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Change impact analysis for Natural Language requirements: An NLP approach

conference contribution
posted on 2015-01-01, 00:00 authored by Chetan AroraChetan Arora, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Arda Goknil, Lionel C Briand, Frank Zimmer
Requirements are subject to frequent changes as a way to ensure that they reflect the current best understanding of a system, and to respond to factors such as new and evolving needs. Changing one requirement in a requirements specification may warrant further changes to the specification, so that the overall correctness and consistency of the specification can be maintained. A manual analysis of how a change to one requirement impacts other requirements is time-consuming and presents a challenge for large requirements specifications. We propose an approach based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for analyzing the impact of change in Natural Language (NL) requirements. Our focus on NL requirements is motivated by the prevalent use of these requirements, particularly in industry. Our approach automatically detects and takes into account the phrasal structure of requirements statements. We argue about the importance of capturing the conditions under which change should propagate to enable more accurate change impact analysis. We propose a quantitative measure for calculating how likely a requirements statement is to be impacted by a change under given conditions. We conduct an evaluation of our approach by applying it to 14 change scenarios from two industrial case studies.

History

Pagination

6-15

Location

Ottawa, Canada

Start date

2015-08-24

End date

2015-08-28

ISSN

1090-705X

eISSN

2332-6441

ISBN-13

9781467369053

Language

eng

Publication classification

E1.1 Full written paper - refereed

Editor/Contributor(s)

Unknown

Title of proceedings

RE 2015 : Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 23rd International Requirements Engineering Conference

Event

International Requirements Engineering. International Conference (23rd : 2015 : Ottawa, Canada)

Publisher

IEEE

Place of publication

Piscataway, N.J.

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