Automated Checking of Conformance to Requirements Templates using Natural Language Processing

in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2015), 41(10), 944-968

Templates are effective tools for increasing the precision of natural language requirements and for avoiding ambiguities that may arise from the use of unrestricted natural language. When templates are ... [more ▼]

Templates are effective tools for increasing the precision of natural language requirements and for avoiding ambiguities that may arise from the use of unrestricted natural language. When templates are applied, it is important to verify that the requirements are indeed written according to the templates. If done manually, checking conformance to templates is laborious, presenting a particular challenge when the task has to be repeated multiple times in response to changes in the requirements. In this article, using techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP), we develop an automated approach for checking conformance to templates. Specifically, we present a generalizable method for casting templates into NLP pattern matchers and reflect on our practical experience implementing automated checkers for two well-known templates in the Requirements Engineering community. We report on the application of our approach to four case studies. Our results indicate that: (1) our approach provides a robust and accurate basis for checking conformance to templates; and (2) the effectiveness of our approach is not compromised even when the requirements glossary terms are unknown. This makes our work particularly relevant to practice, as many industrial requirements documents have incomplete glossaries. [less ▲]

Assessing IT Security Standards Against the Upcoming GDPR for Cloud Systems

Poster (2015, March 11)

This work in progress aims at identifying a mapping between the current security standards (in particular, but not limited to, ISO 27001-2013) and the upcoming regulations in data protection. The aim is ... [more ▼]

This work in progress aims at identifying a mapping between the current security standards (in particular, but not limited to, ISO 27001-2013) and the upcoming regulations in data protection. The aim is to find an overlap between the requirements for data protection and the existing security standards, to measure the gap that a business has to cross (and consequently an estimate of the expenses that it must sustain) to achieve compliance with the GDPR. [less ▲]

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 and 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)

Classification, structuring, and assessment of evidence for safety: A systematic literature review

in International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation, Luxembourg 2013 (2013)

Matching and Merging of Variant Feature Specifications.

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

Research-Based Innovation: A Tale of Three Projects in Model-Driven Engineering

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