Missing requirements and relationship discovery through proxy viewpoints model
Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing
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This dissertation addresses the problem of “missing requirements” in software requirements specification (SRS) expressed in natural language. Due to rapid changes in technology and business frequently witnessed over time, the original SRS documents often experience the problems of missing, not available, and hard-to-locate requirements. More specifically, (1) Earlier solutions do not consider missing requirements from multiple viewpoints; (2) SRS documents with many missing requirements typically tend to be poorly structured and maintained as well as hard-to-trace; (3) SRS documents with missing requirements represent an incomplete domain model; (4) Manual discovery (identification and incorporation) of missing requirements is highly labor intensive and error-prone; and finally (5) These inherent rigid subproblems do not allow efficient adaptation of SRS changes and improvements. Most SRS documents today are plagued by a combination of one or more of these problems, and they become even more prevalent while dealing with legacy status SRS. In this dissertation, a new methodology entitled “Proxy Viewpoints Model-based Requirements Discovery (PVRD)” is presented. Proxy viewpoints is an approximation of viewpoints that would have been constructed if the requirements of the domain were well-engineered from the beginning of a software development life cycle by using one of the viewpoints oriented requirements engineering methods. The PVRD methodology consists of four models: viewpoints model, enterprise model, missing requirements types categorization model, and requirements discovery and analysis model. Based on this integrated framework, the PVRD methodology is able to create a proxy viewpoints model and provides a new way of discovering missing requirements while improving the requirements representation space through the new indexing structure that supports multiple viewpoints from many stakeholders in a large-scale complex software system. Well-designed explanatory scenario-based multiple-case studies are developed not only as a way to validate the methodology but also to show its uniqueness and novelty and to provide exemplary guidance for researchers from academia and real practitioners from industry. Various evidence and findings that support the propositions of this study validate that the PVRD methodology provides an integrated environment that supports a requirements discovery and analysis process as well as efficient management.