Poster: Patterns of Requirements Related Communication

This poster was presented at REFSQ’12 in Essen, Germany and highlights our vision for this project: investigating patterns of requirements related discussions that can help projects continually monitor the health of requirements-driven collaboration.

Introduction

Eff ective collaboration during Requirements Engineering is essential for project success and includes

  • the discussion and negotiation of requirements with di erent stakeholders,
  • deriving, assigning, and scheduling tasks and subtasks from these requirements.

Problem:

  • Existing requirements management tools o ffer limited support.
  • Practitioners rely on a combination of collaboration tools such as email and issue-trackers.
  • No overview of the state of the requirements-related discussion.
  • Lost opportunity in leveraging the wealth of requirements-related communication data available in projects.

Research Goal

In our research we aim on investigating patterns of requirements related discussions that can help projects continually monitor the health of requirements-driven collaboration.

Research Method

Based on a framework for analyzing requirements-driven collaboration [1], we o ffer to analyze requirements-driven communication by developing stakeholder requirements centric social networks (RCSN). fpn

Based on our ability to automatically detect requirements clari cation in this communication (by using machine learning, c.f. [2]), we can identify patterns of requirements clari cation.

Anticipated benefits for software engineering practice

  • Support for Seeking Domain Experts as well as Technical Experts
  • Identifying the brokers of requirements related information to make project managers aware of critical people in a project
  • Assessing the health of requirements and their development.

References

  1. Damian, D., Kwan, I., Marczak, S.: Requirements-driven collaboration: Leveraging the invisible relationships between requirements and people. In: Mistrik, I., Grundy, J., Hoek, A., and Whitehead, J. (eds.) Collaborative Software Engineering. 57-76. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg (2010).
  2. Knauss, E., Houmb, S., Schneider, K., Islam, S., Jürjens, J.: Supporting Requirements Engineers in Recognising Security Issues. In: Proceedings of REFSQ’11. Springer, Essen, Germany (2011).