What Works Better? A Study of Classifying Requirements

Classifying requirements into functional requirements (FR) and non-functional ones (NFR) is an important task in requirements engineering. However, automated classification of requirements written in natural language is not straightforward, due to the variability of natural language and the absence of a controlled vocabulary. This paper investigates how automated classification of requirements into FR and NFR can be improved and how well several machine learning approaches work in this context. We contribute an approach for preprocessing requirements that standardizes and normalizes requirements before applying classification algorithms. Further, we report on how well several existing machine learning methods perform for automated classification of NFRs into sub-categories such as usability, availability, or performance. Our study is performed on 625 requirements provided by the OpenScience tera-PROMISE repository. We found that our preprocessing improved the performance of an existing classification method. We further found significant differences in the performance of approaches such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Biterm Topic Modeling, or Naive Bayes for the sub-classification of NFRs.Comment: 7 pages, the 25th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE'17

Estimation of Equivalent Axleloads Using Data Collected by Automated Vehicle Classification and Weigh-in-Motion Equipment

The primary objective of this research study was to modify the existing EAL estimation system to include data obtained using the Golden River Weigh-In-Motion system and automated vehicle classification equipment. Data are to be collected over a three-year cycle in accordance with the FHWA Traffic Monitoring Guide. Having the capability of moving the portable weigh-in-motion scales to locations other than interstate sites permits the collection and analyses of specific data at sites on other highway functional classifications. Such data permits estimating both accumulated and future EAL requirements for that site. Such data permits estimating EAL requirements for sites on the same highway functional classification for which AADT is the only available data. An algorithm was developed to identify heavy/coal trucks weighed by W\M. The algorithm involves a minimum weight for straight-frame trucks and for semi-trailer coal trucks has the additional parameter of gross weight divided by the spacing between the last axle on the tractor and the first axle on the trailer. The algorithm works because the coal semi-trailer is shorter than a normal semi-trailer. Historical data files have been sorted by highway functional classification to permit calculating EAL requirements on a three-year cycle corresponding to the requirements of the FHWA Traffic Monitoring Guide. The revised computer programs use the same data format contained in historical files. The basic equation for estimating EALs contains the following seven parameters as independent variables; 1) annual average daily traffic volume, 2) average fraction of trucks in the traffic stream, 3) average fraction of coal trucks in the total truck population, 4) average number of axles per coal truck, 5) average number of axles per non-coal truck, 6) average number of equivalent axleloads per coal-truck axle, and 7) average number of equivalent axleloads per non-coal-truck axle

Semi-automated Software Requirements Categorisation using Machine Learning Algorithms

Requirement engineering is a mandatory phase of the Software development life cycle (SDLC) that includes defining and documenting system requirements in the Software Requirements Specification (SRS). As the complexity increases, it becomes difficult to categorise the requirements into functional and non-functional requirements. Presently, the dearth of automated techniques necessitates reliance on labour-intensive and time-consuming manual methods for this purpose. This research endeavours to address this gap by investigating and contrasting two prominent feature extraction techniques and their efficacy in automating the classification of requirements. Natural language processing methods are used in the text pre-processing phase, followed by the Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and Word2Vec for feature extraction for further understanding. These features are used as input to the Machine Learning algorithms. This study compares existing machine learning algorithms and discusses their correctness in categorising the software requirements. In our study, we have assessed the algorithms Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Logistic Regression (LR), Neural Network (NN), K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) on the precision and accuracy parameters. The results obtained in this study showed that the TF-IDF feature selection algorithm performed better in categorising requirements than the Word2Vec algorithm, with an accuracy of 91.20% for the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest algorithm as compared to 87.36% for the SVM algorithm. A 3.84% difference is seen between the two when applied to the publicly available PURE dataset. We believe these results will aid developers in building products that aid in requirement engineering

Supporting Semantically Enhanced Web Service Discovery for Enterprise Application Integration

The availability of sophisticated Web service discovery mechanisms is an essential prerequisite for increasing the levels of efficiency and automation in EAI. In this chapter, we present an approach for developing service registries building on the UDDI standard and offering semantically-enhanced publication and discovery capabilities in order to overcome some of the known limitations of conventional service registries. The approach aspires to promote efficiency in EAI in a number of ways, but primarily by automating the task of evaluating service integrability on the basis of the input and output messages that are defined in the Web service’s interface. The presented solution combines the use of three technology standards to meet its objectives: OWL-DL, for modelling service characteristics and performing fine-grained service matchmaking via DL reasoning, SAWSDL, for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces, and UDDI, for storing and retrieving syntactic and semantic information about services and service providers

Combining SAWSDL, OWL-DL and UDDI for Semantically Enhanced Web Service Discovery

UDDI registries are included as a standard offering within the product suite of any major SOA vendor, serving as the foundation for establishing design-time and run-time SOA governance. Despite the success of the UDDI specification and its rapid uptake by the industry, the capabilities of its offered service discovery facilities are rather limited. The lack of machine-understandable semantics in the technical specifications and classification schemes used for retrieving services, prevent UDDI registries from supporting fully automated and thus truly effective service discovery. This paper presents the implementation of a semantically-enhanced registry that builds on the UDDI specification and augments its service publication and discovery facilities to overcome the aforementioned limitations. The proposed solution combines the use of SAWSDL for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces and the use of OWL-DL for modelling service capabilities and for performing matchmaking via DL reasoning

Evaluating Classifiers in SE Research: The ECSER Pipeline and Two Replication Studies

Context: Automated classifiers, often based on machine learning (ML), are increasingly used in software engineering (SE) for labelling previously unseen SE data. Researchers have proposed automated classifiers that predict if a code chunk is a clone, if a requirement is functional or non-functional, if the outcome of a test case is non-deterministic, etc. Objective: The lack of guidelines for applying and reporting classification techniques for SE research leads to studies in which important research steps may be skipped, key findings might not be identified and shared, and the readers may find reported results (e.g., precision or recall above 90%) that are not a credible representation of the performance in operational contexts. The goal of this paper is to advance ML4SE research by proposing rigorous ways of conducting and reporting research. Results: We introduce the ECSER (Evaluating Classifiers in Software Engineering Research) pipeline, which includes a series of steps for conducting and evaluating automated classification research in SE. Then, we conduct two replication studies where we apply ECSER to recent research in requirements engineering and in software testing. Conclusions: In addition to demonstrating the applicability of the pipeline, the replication studies demonstrate ECSER’s usefulness: not only do we confirm and strengthen some findings identified by the original authors, but we also discover additional ones. Some of these findings contradict the original ones

Non-functional Property based service selection: A survey and classification of approaches

In recent years there has been much effort dedicated to developing approaches for service selection based on non-functional properties. It is clear that much progress has been made, and by considering the individual approaches there is some overlap in functionality, but obviously also some divergence. In this paper we contribute a classification of approaches, that is, we define a number of criteria which allow to differentiate approaches. We use this classification to provide a comparison of existing approaches and in that sense provide a survey of the state of the art of the field. Finally we make some suggestions as to where the research in this area might be heading and which new challenges need to be addressed

ELICA: An Automated Tool for Dynamic Extraction of Requirements Relevant Information

Requirements elicitation requires extensive knowledge and deep understanding of the problem domain where the final system will be situated. However, in many software development projects, analysts are required to elicit the requirements from an unfamiliar domain, which often causes communication barriers between analysts and stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a requirements ELICitation Aid tool (ELICA) to help analysts better understand the target application domain by dynamic extraction and labeling of requirements-relevant knowledge. To extract the relevant terms, we leverage the flexibility and power of Weighted Finite State Transducers (WFSTs) in dynamic modeling of natural language processing tasks. In addition to the information conveyed through text, ELICA captures and processes non-linguistic information about the intention of speakers such as their confidence level, analytical tone, and emotions. The extracted information is made available to the analysts as a set of labeled snippets with highlighted relevant terms which can also be exported as an artifact of the Requirements Engineering (RE) process. The application and usefulness of ELICA are demonstrated through a case study. This study shows how pre-existing relevant information about the application domain and the information captured during an elicitation meeting, such as the conversation and stakeholders' intentions, can be captured and used to support analysts achieving their tasks.Comment: 2018 IEEE 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshop

WSMO-lite annotations for web services

and other research output