Requirements management with semantic technology: an empirical study on automated requirements categorization and conflict analysis

  • Authors:

  • Thomas Moser;Dietmar Winkler;Matthias Heindl;Stefan Biffl

  • Affiliations:

  • Christian Doppler Laboratory, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria;Christian Doppler Laboratory, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria;Christian Doppler Laboratory, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria;Christian Doppler Laboratory, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

  • Venue:
  • CAiSE'11 Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Advanced information systems engineering
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Requirements managers aim at keeping the set of requirements consistent and up to date throughout the project by conducting the following tasks: requirements categorization, requirements conflict analysis, and requirements tracing. However, the manual conduct of these tasks takes significant effort and is error-prone. In this paper we propose to use semantic technology as foundation for automating the requirements management tasks and introduce the ontology-based reporting approach OntRep. We evaluate the effectiveness and effort the OntRep approach based on a real-world industrial empirical study with professional Austrian IT project managers. Major results were that OntRep provides reasonable capabilities for the automated categorization of requirements, was when compared to a manual approach considerably more effective to identify conflicts, and produced less false positives with similar effort.