The Synonym management process in SAREL

The specification phase is one of the most important and least supported parts of the software development process. The SAREL system has been conceived as a knowledge-based tool to improve the specification phase. The purpose of SAREL (Assistance System for Writing Software Specifications in Natural Language) is to assist engineers in the creation of software specifications written in Natural Language (NL). These documents are divided into several parts. We can distinguish the Introduction and the Overall Description as parts that should be used in the Knowledge Base construction. The information contained in the Specific Requirements Section corresponds to the information represented in the Requirements Base. In order to obtain high-quality software requirements specification the writing norms that define the linguistic restrictions required and the software engineering constraints related to the quality factors have been taken into account. One of the controls performed is the lexical analysis that verifies the words belong to the application domain lexicon which consists of the Required and the Extended lexicon. In this sense a synonym management process is needed in order to get a quality software specification. The aim of this paper is to present the synonym management process performed during the Knowledge Base construction. Such process makes use of the Spanish Wordnet developed inside the Eurowordnet project. This process generates both the Required lexicon and the Extended lexicon that will be used during the Requirements Base construction.Postprint (published version

Los modelos verbales en lenguaje natural y su utilización en la elaboración de esquemas conceptuales para el desarrollo de software: una revisión crítica

Software development begins with a series of interviews to potential users with the purpose of determining the software requirements; as a result of the interviews yield verbal models in natural language. Based on the verbal models, conceptual frameworks can be designed. These are diagrams that allow graphic data and functions related to the problem to develop software. This article covers worldwide work carried out in this field, with an analysis of the possible research topics based on the unsolved problems.El desarrollo de software inicia con una serie de entrevistas realizadas a los usuarios potenciales con el fin de determinar los requisitos del software; como resultado de las entrevistas se obtienen modelos verbales en lenguaje natural. A partir de los modelos verbales es posible construir esquemas conceptuales, que son diagramas que permiten representar gráficamente los datos y funciones asociados con el problema para realizar el desarrollo del software. En este artículo se compendian los trabajos que en esta materia se han adelantado a nivel mundial, realizando un análisis de los posibles tópicos de investigación a partir de los problemas no resueltos

From Requirements to Architectural Style Focusing on Connector Properties

Abstract Even though the quality of software requirements and software architecture have a significant impact on the success and quality of a software project, few tools exist to support the transition from requirements to architecture. Many desired qualities in a software project that are expressed in the software requirements can be achieved with software architectural styles. This paper proposes an approach towards an automated approach that can help choose an appropriate architectural style given a set of natural language software requirements. The approach, Automated Architecture Scoring Method (AASM), transforms software requirements into a formal model in conceptual graphs which is analyzed for possible software architectural components, and possible properties of those components. AASM then analyzes those properties and develops a recommendation for an architectural style. This paper focuses on using conceptual graphs to guide architectural style selection, with a particular emphasis on software architectural connector properties

Elicitation and management of user requirements in market-driven software development

Market-driven software development companies experience challenges in requirements management that many traditional requirements engineering methods and techniques do not acknowledge. Large markets, limited contact with end users, and strong competition forces the market-driven software development company to constantly invent new, selling requirements, frequently release new versions with an accompanying pressure of short time-to-market, and take both the technical and financial risks of development. This thesis presents empirical results from case studies in requirements elicitation and management at a software development company. The results include techniques to explore, understand, and handle bottlenecks in the requirements process where requirements continuously arrive at a high rate from many different stakeholders. Through simulation of the requirements process, potential bottlenecks are identified at an early stage, and fruitless improvement attempts may be avoided. Several techniques are evaluated and recommended to support the market-driven organisation in order to increase software quality and avoid process overload situations. It is shown that a quick and uncomplicated in-house usability evaluation technique, an improved heuristic evaluation, may be adequate to get closer to customer satisfaction. Since needs and opportunities differ between markets, a distributed prioritisation technique is suggested that will help the organisation to pick the most cost-beneficial and customer satisfying requirements for development. Finally, a technique based on automated natural language analysis is investigated with the aim to help resolve congestion in the requirements engineering process, yet retaining ideas that may bring a competitive advantage

A Proposed Method to Identify Requirements Significant to Mass Reduction

Reducing the mass of engineering products holds the potential for significant benefits by reducing material costs, environmental impact, transportation costs, and in the case of vehicles, reducing fuel consumption. While there are many approaches for reducing mass, analyzing requirements has the greatest potential since requirements definition is the earliest phase of product development, where the most design freedom exists. This thesis proposes a requirement analysis method that identifies requirements that impact significant amounts of mass. The research hypothesis is: Engineering requirements can be represented and processed in a systematic manner and linked to physical components and systems, thus enabling mass reduction in reverse engineering and product redesign. The approach proposed in this research follows. Engineering requirements are linked to mass through the creation of a standard requirement statement using pre-processing rules and syntax rules. These rules and guidelines are applicable to authoring new requirements and analyzing existing requirements documentation. The processed engineering requirements are linked to physical components and assemblies based on how the requirements affect the components. These relationships are captured in Design Structure Matrices (DSMs) and Domain Mapping Matrices (DMMs). These DMMs and DSMs are used to attain the amount of mass each requirement affects and the level of coupling of each requirement. Further, representations of the requirements, components, and associated relationships are represented using two software tools. First, a systems engineering tool is used to model the system. Second, this model is exported to a traditional spreadsheet application to perform basic mathematical and data filtering functions. Finally, the method is demonstrated on three subsystems of Family of Medium Tactical Vehicle (FMTV) truck

A Framework for Logical Structure Extraction from Software Requirements Documents

General purpose rich-text editors, such as MS Word are often used to author software requirements specifications. These requirements specifications contain many different logical structures, such as use cases, business rules and functional requirements. Automated recognition and extraction of these logical structures is necessary to provide useful automated requirements management features, such as automated traceability, template conformance checking, guided editing and interoperability with sophisticated requirements management tools like Requisite Pro. The variability among instances of these logical structures and their attributes poses many challenges for their accurate recognition and extraction. The thesis provides a framework for the extraction of logical structures from software requirements documents. The framework models information about style, structure, and attributes of the logical structures and uses the defined meta-model to extract instances of logical structures. A meta-model also incorporates information about the variability present in the instances. The framework includes an extraction tool, ET, that reads the meta-model and extracts instances of modelled logical structures from the documents. The framework is evaluated on a collection of real-world software requirements documents. Using the framework, different logical structures can be extracted with high precision and recall, each close to 100%. The performance of the extraction tool is acceptable for fast extraction of logical structures from documents with extraction times ranging from a few milliseconds to a few seconds

Understanding and supporting large-scale requirements management

Large market-driven software companies face new challenges in requirements engineering and management that emerged due to their recent extensive growth. At the same time, the pressure generated by competitors’ and users’ expectations demands being more competitive, creative and flexible to more quickly respond to a rapidly changing market situation. In the pursuit of staying competitive in this context, new ideas on how to improve the current software engineering practice are requested to help maintaining the engineering efficiency while coping with growing size and complexity of requirements engineering processes and their products. This thesis focuses on understanding and supporting large-scale requirements management for developing software products to open markets. In particular, this thesis focuses on the following requirements management activities in the mentioned context, namely: scope management, variability management and requirements consolidation. The goals of the research effort in this thesis are to provide effective methods in supporting mentioned requirements management activities in a situation when the size of them and their complexity require large time and skills efforts. Based on empirical research, where both quantitative and qualitative approaches were utilized, this thesis reports on possible improvements for managing variability and presents visualization techniques to assist scope management for large-scale software product development contexts. Both reported ideas are empirically evaluated in case studies in a large-scale context. Additionally, the benefits of using linguistic methods for requirements consolidation are investigated in a replicated experimental study based on a relevant industry scenario