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

Personal recommendations in requirements engineering : the OpenReq approach

[Context & motivation] Requirements Engineering (RE) is considered as one of the most critical phases in software development but still many challenges remain open. [Problem] There is a growing trend of applying recommender systems to solve open RE challenges like requirements and stakeholder discovery; however, the existent proposals focus on specific RE tasks and do not give a general coverage for the RE process. [Principal ideas/results] In this research preview, we present the OpenReq approach to the development of intelligent recommendation and decision technologies that support different phases of RE in software projects. Specifically, we present the OpenReq part for personal recommendations for stakeholders. [Contribution] OpenReq aim is to improve and speed up RE processes, especially in large and distributed systemsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Tools for producing formal specifications : a view of current architectures and future directions

During the last decade, one important contribution towards requirements engineering has been the advent of formal specification languages. They offer a well-defined notation that can improve consistency and avoid ambiguity in specifications. However, the process of obtaining formal specifications that are consistent with the requirements is itself a difficult activity. Hence various researchers are developing systems that aid the transition from informal to formal specifications. The kind of problems tackled and the contributions made by these proposed systems are very diverse. This paper brings these studies together to provide a vision for future architectures that aim to aid the transition from informal to formal specifications. The new architecture, which is based on the strengths of existing studies, tackles a number of key issues in requirements engineering such as identifying ambiguities, incompleteness, and reusability. The paper concludes with a discussion of the research problems that need to be addressed in order to realise the proposed architecture

Verifying the Safety of a Flight-Critical System

This paper describes our work on demonstrating verification technologies on a flight-critical system of realistic functionality, size, and complexity. Our work targeted a commercial aircraft control system named Transport Class Model (TCM), and involved several stages: formalizing and disambiguating requirements in collaboration with do- main experts; processing models for their use by formal verification tools; applying compositional techniques at the architectural and component level to scale verification. Performed in the context of a major NASA milestone, this study of formal verification in practice is one of the most challenging that our group has performed, and it took several person months to complete it. This paper describes the methodology that we followed and the lessons that we learned.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure