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Requirements Management with Semantic Technology:
An Empirical Study on Automated Requirements
Categorization and Conflict Analysis
Thomas Moser, Dietmar Winkler, Matthias Heindl, and Stefan Biffl
Christian Doppler Laboratory
Software Engineering Integration for Flexible Automation Systems
Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems
Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
{firstname.lastname}@tuwien.ac.at
Abstract.
Requirements managers aim at keeping the set of requirements con-
sistent 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 founda-
tion 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 require-
ments, was when compared to a manual approach considerably more effective
to identify conflicts, and produced less false positives with similar effort.
Keywords:
Requirements categorization, requirements conflict analysis,
consistency checking, requirements tracing, case study, empirical evaluation.
1 Introduction
A major goal of requirements engineering is to achieve a common understanding on
the set of requirements between all project stakeholders. Modern IT projects are
complex due to the high number and complexity of requirements, and geographically
distributed project stakeholders with different backgrounds and terminologies. There-
fore, adequate requirements management (ReqM) tools are a major contribution
to address these challenges. Current ReqM tools typically work with a common
requirements database, which can be accessed by all stakeholders to retrieve informa-
tion on requirements content, state, and interdependencies.
ReqM tools help project managers and requirements engineers to keep the overview
on large amounts of requirements by supporting: (a)
Requirements
categorization
by
clustering requirements into user-defined subsets to help users find relevant require-
ments more quickly, e.g., by sorting and filtering attribute values; (b)
Requirements
conflict analysis
(or consistency checking) by analyzing requirements from different
