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moment), so that all used terms in requirements can be mapped to categories. Regard-
ing conflict analysis, OntRep found all conflicts in the requirements during the em-
pirical study, while manual conflict analysis identified only 50 to 60% of the conflicts
and produced more false positives with similar effort. OntRep analyzes three types of
conflicts at the moment: conflicts between requirements, conflicts between require-
ments and some constraints, or conflicts of requirements with some formal guidelines.
The OntRep automation approach seems beneficial for project managers who want to
manage their requirements with less effort, but in the same turn keep the requirements
consistency high. Using the OntRep approach, organizations in software development
projects could benefit from reduced manual effort for categorization and conflict
analysis, and reduced communication and clarification effort through semi-automated
semantic conflict analysis support.
Further work will focus on the replication of this pilot study in a larger context,
i.e., with more participants to improve the external validity of results. In addition, we
want to increase the number of requirements to be categorized and analyzed for con-
flicts in order to analyze the correctness, completeness, and especially the effort for
larger sets of requirements. We assume that especially the efficiency of OntRep will
improve with the number of requirements when compared to a manual approach.
Another aspect is to adapt OntRep for application to a set of requirements.
Acknowledgments.
We want to thank Alexander Wagner for the prototype imple-
mentation of the OntRep concepts and his support during the pilot study. This work
has been supported by the Christian Doppler Forschungsgesellschaft and the BMWFJ,
Austria.
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