Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Therefore, as mentioned before EA-Miner is not a “silver bullet” aimed at
automating 100% of AORE tasks. However, EA-Miner is an extremely valuable tool
in the sense of automating costly tasks and helping the requirements engineer to focus
on key information, to improve understanding of the system as well as to generate the
models in a specific AORE technique.
4.3 General Guidelines (Used in All Activities in Fig. 5)
The goal of the guidelines is to help requirements engineers to get the most of EA-
Miner's features by offering guidance on how to make good decisions. Next we
describe some guidelines that can be used in the previous activities for the Viewpoint-
based AORE approach. If we had considered another AORE approach then another
set of guidelines would be used.
Guidelines for Viewpoint Identification and Structuring:
Avoid viewpoints that are too general: Viewpoints generally represent
stakeholders or other systems that have a specific interest on the current system.
Immediate candidates to discard are ones that represent a very general concept
(e.g., system and type in Fig. 7);
Check the semantic tag: Another good indication of the relevance of the
viewpoint is to look at its semantic tag and check if it belongs to the most frequent
categories. For example the most frequent semantic category in the previous
example is “vehicle and transport on land” containing words such as vehicle,
driver, lane, motorway and road which are good candidates as they represent
entities from the problem domain under consideration (toll collection system);
Sort the viewpoints by relative frequency: Generally important concepts are
mentioned time and again in the document. Use EA-Miner filters to sort the
relevant viewpoints. However, be aware that in some cases important viewpoints
can contain a low frequency;
Apply the stemming and synonym filtering: This enables to group viewpoints
that have a slight variation (e.g., driver and drivers) or that are synonyms (e.g.,
freeway and motorway) as the same concept;
Guidelines for Early Aspects Identification and Structuring:
Edit the Requirements when appropriate: As discussed before, the requirements
assigned to the early aspects are a good indication for the crosscutting relationships
but generally the requirements engineer has to enter new requirements for the early
aspect. This should be done following discussion with relevant stakeholders;
Expand the lexicon: Every time a new document is mined it is likely that new
vocabulary has to be added to the lexicon representing new early aspects. The tool
flags the candidates by showing their details (e.g., semantic tags). If the meaning
represents a new broadly scoped property that is not in the lexicon then add it.
5 Evaluation
This section shows, in the context of two case studies, how EA-Miner can be a
valuable approach for undertaking AORE activities. Evaluating software engineering
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