Client:

Hasan Kitapci
Research Assistant,
USC Center for Software Engineering
Email: kitapci@usc.edu

Ultimate Client: CSE Affiliates; eventually the public

Overview Description

Good – sufficiently complete, consistent, traceable, and testable – requirements are a prerequisite for successful software projects. Without understanding what the success-critical stakeholders really want and need and transforming these wants and needs into requirements specifications in a concise, understandable and testable manner, projects will lead to either major late rework or project termination.

Success-critical stakeholders, who can contribute most value, insights, and realism, often have the least time to participate in requirements negotiation process. The reason why supporting requirements negotiation process is important is that bad decisions made during this process may lead to wrong and poor requirements, which subsequently lead to a software product not fit for purpose, or rejected by the market. Moreover, decisions containing defects that used as references in further processes will cause more defects in the product's requirements, design, code, and documentation. If these defects aren't found and fixed where they introduced, they will cost more to repair in the later phases.

During the EasyWinWin requirements negotiation process, teams jointly brainstorm, organize, and negotiate informal stakeholder inputs into a comprehensive set of decisions, existing conflicts, and achieved agreements. Nevertheless, the negotiation result is not a complete, consistent, traceable, and testable requirements specification. There is a need to develop an integrated support environment that brings together techniques and solutions (natural language processing, keyword analysis, inspection, template-based refinement, etc.) to the issues of requirement negotiation process where all success-critical stakeholders can participate in elicitation, documentation and validation of requirements.

Online Requirements Negotiation Support System will enable the success-critical stakeholders analyze the negotiation results with natural language processing and keyword analysis based defects detection techniques and provide even more feedbacks about the negotiation results. They will iteratively continue improving the content of the negotiation results and semi-automatically transform the results into requirements definitions using computer-initiated templates.

Some key features of the system are:

• Allow multiple user access the system
• Apply part of speech tagging to the negotiation results
• Check the defective keywords in the negotiation results
• Apply defect identification rules to find defects in negotiation results
• Extract information from negotiation results to fill requirements attributes (description, priority, traceability, etc.)
• Store results in a database
• Generate a requirement document