Improving Requirements Glossary Construction via Clustering: Approach and Industrial Case Studies

in 8th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2014) (2014, September)

Context. A glossary is an important part of any software requirements document. By making explicit the technical terms in a domain and providing definitions for them, a glossary serves as a helpful tool ... [more ▼]

Context. A glossary is an important part of any software requirements document. By making explicit the technical terms in a domain and providing definitions for them, a glossary serves as a helpful tool for mitigating ambiguities. Objective. A necessary step for building a glossary is to decide upon the glossary terms and to identify their related terms. Doing so manually is a laborious task. Our objective is to provide automated support for identifying candidate glossary terms and their related terms. Our work differs from existing work on term extraction mainly in that, instead of providing a flat list of candidate terms, our approach \emph{clusters} the terms by relevance. Method. We use case study research as the basis for our empirical investigation. Results. We present an automated approach for identifying and clustering candidate glossary terms. We evaluate the approach through two industrial case studies; one study concerns a satellite software component, and the other -- an evidence management tool for safety certification. Conclusion. Our results indicate that over requirements documents: (1) our approach is more accurate than other existing methods for identifying candidate glossary terms; this makes it less likely that our approach will miss important glossary terms. (2) Clustering provides an effective basis for grouping related terms; this makes clustering a useful support tool for selection of glossary terms and associating these terms with their related terms. [less ▲]

Requirement Boilerplates: Transition From Manually-Enforced to Automatically-Verifiable Natural Language Patterns

in Requirements Patterns (RePa), 2014 IEEE 4th International Workshop on (2014, August)

By enforcing predefined linguistic patterns on requirements statements, boilerplates serve as an effective tool for mitigating ambiguities and making Natural Language requirements more amenable to ... [more ▼]

By enforcing predefined linguistic patterns on requirements statements, boilerplates serve as an effective tool for mitigating ambiguities and making Natural Language requirements more amenable to automation. For a boilerplate to be effective, one needs to check whether the boilerplate has been properly applied. This should preferably be done automatically, as manual checking of conformance to a boilerplate can be laborious and error prone. In this paper, we present insights into building an automatic solution for checking conformance to requirement boilerplates using Natural Language Processing (NLP). We present a generalizable method for casting requirement boilerplates into automated NLP pattern matchers and reflect on our practical experience implementing automated checkers for two well-known boilerplates in the RE community. We further highlight the use of NLP for identification of several problematic syntactic constructs in requirements which can lead to ambiguities. [less ▲]

Traceability and SysML Design Slices to Support Safety Inspections: A Controlled Experiment

in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering & Methodology (2014), 23(1),

Automatic Checking of Conformance to Requirement Boilerplates via Text Chunking: An Industrial Case Study

in 7th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2013) (2013, October)

PWWM: A Personal Web Workflow Methodology

in Chignell, M.; Cordy, J.; Kealey, R. (Eds.) et al The Personal Web (2013)

Supporting the Verification of Compliance to Safety Standards via Model-Driven Engineering: Approach, Tool-Support and Empirical Validation

in Information & Software Technology (2013), 55(1), 836-864

Modeling and Analysis of CPU Usage in Safety-Critical Embedded Systems to Support Stress Testing

in 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages & Systems (2012)

Matching and Merging of Variant Feature Specifications.

in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2012), 38(6), 1355-1375