Mining requirements links

[Context & motivation] Obtaining traceability among requirements and between requirements and other artifacts is an extremely important activity in practice, an interesting area for theoretical study, and a major hurdle in common industrial experience. Substantial effort is spent on establishing and updating such links in any large project - even more so when requirements refer to a product family. [Question/problem] While most research is concerned with ways to reduce the effort needed to establish and maintain traceability links, a different question can also be asked: how is it possible to harness the vast amount of implicit (and tacit) knowledge embedded in already-established links? Is there something to be learned about a specific problem or domain, or about the humans who establish traces, by studying such traces? [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we present preliminary results from a study applying different machine learning techniques to an industrial case study, and test to what degree common hypothesis hold in our case. [Contribution] Reshaping traceability data into knowledge can contribute to more effective automatic tools to suggest candidates for linking, to inform improvements in writing style, and at the same time provide some insight into both the domain of interest and the actual implementation techniques. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

A survey on implicit requirements management practices in small and medium-sized enterprises

Učinkovito upravljanje zahtjevima koje uključuje i izričita i bezuvjetna motrišta pretpostavka je za uspješni razvoj softvera. Iako su razni istraživači i praktičari prepoznali važnost bezuvjetnih zahtjeva (implicit requirements - IMR) za opći uspjeh razvijenog softvera, potrebno je povezati te teorijske pretpostavke oko bezuvjetnih zahtjeva s postojećim stanjem. U radu se provodi empirijsko istraživanje o shvaćanju i provođenju bezuvjetnih zahtjeva u malim i srednje malim organizacijama koje se bave razvojem softvera. Provedena je anketa preko interneta na koju je stiglo 56 odgovora iz 23 zemlje. Analiza je pokazala da se kritički organizacijski čimbenici kao što su broj godina provedenih na poslu u nekoj organizaciji, godine iskustva organizacije u inženjeringu zahtjeva i veličina tima koji se bavi razvojem softvera pozitivno odražavaju na sagledavanje i pristup bezuvjetnim zahtjevima u okviru organizacije. Izražava se potreba za komparativnom procjenom postojećih alata podrške bezuvjetnim zahtjevima kako bi se potvrdio potencijal tih alata u rješavanju postojećih izazova i popunjavanju nedostataka koji još postoje.Effective requirements management that embraces both explicit and implicit aspects is a prerequisite for successful software development. Although different researchers and practitioners have identified the importance of implicit requirements (IMR) for overall successful outcome of software development, there is a need to correlate these theoretical assumptions about implicit requirements with the state of the practice. This paper empirically investigates the perception and handling of implicit requirements in small and medium-sized software organisations. The survey was undertaken through a web-based questionnaire to which 56 participants from 23 countries responded. The study found that critical organisational factors such as number of years in business of an organisation, the years of experience of an organisation in requirements engineering, and size of software development team have positive correlation with the perception and handling of implicit requirements within an organisation. It also recommends that a comparative evaluation of the existing support tools for implicit requirements is necessary in order to validate the potential of these tools to solve existing challenges, and determine gaps that still exist