Patterns of Requirements Clarification

For ages, requirements engineering research focused on creating good documentation. This focus seems to contradict observations that can be made in everyday software projects:

• Even perfect documentation needs to be read (and interpreted) by team members in order to establish a shared understanding of the requirements in the team, let alone the speed at which it gets obsolete.

• Quite a few organizations do very well without comprehensive requirements documentation – especially in the field of agile software development.

• Team members do in fact have extensive knowledge of the requirements and they often communicate it through informal or online discussions, as well as in project artifact repositories.

In this project we create an approach to analyzing online requirements communication over time. Automatic identification of communication events that focus on clarification allows us to visualize the trajectory of clarification, i.e. the amount of clarification events in relation to other communication. Preliminary results from analyzing online requirements communication in IBM’s Jazz project led to the identification of a set of six clarification patterns (see Figures above). Some of these patterns can be indicative of problematic requirements and thus useful to managers in diagnosing the health of the requirements development in their project.

A clarification trajectory visualizes the amount of clarification relative to other communication related to a specific (set of) requirement(s). The horizontal axis shows the time, while the vertical axis shows the amount and type of communication events.

Clarification events are shown in red below the timeline, other communication events are shown in blue above the timeline. A Gray line indicates the difference between other communication and clarification.

To help managers analyzing communication about requirements, we show stakeholders that participate in communication about a given requirement in a social network. Stakeholders are depicted as small pie charts that show the percentage of clarification in their communication  red. Two stakeholders are connected, when the communicate about the same requirement in the same time period.