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Running Out of Words: How Similar User Stories Can Help to Elaborate Individual Natural Language Requirement Descriptions

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Information and Software Technologies (ICIST 2016)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 639))

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Abstract

While requirements focus on how the user interacts with the system, user stories concentrate on the purpose of software features. But in practice, functional requirements are also described in user stories. For this reason, requirements clarification is needed, especially when they are written in natural language and do not stick to any templates (e.g., “as an X, I want Y so that Z ...”). However, there is a lot of implicit knowledge that is not expressed in words. As a result, natural language requirements descriptions may suffer from incompleteness. Existing approaches try to formalize natural language or focus only on entirely missing and not on deficient requirements. In this paper, we therefore present an approach to detect knowledge gaps in user-generated software requirements for interactive requirement clarification: We provide tailored suggestions to the users in order to get more precise descriptions. For this purpose, we identify not fully instantiated predicate argument structures in requirements written in natural language and use context information to realize what was meant by the user.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Refer to http://sfb901.uni-paderborn.de for more information.

  2. 2.

    E.g.,“I want to send mails with large attachments.”

  3. 3.

    http://www.alias-i.com/lingpipe/.

  4. 4.

    Curator’s SRL [4] was selected because of its convincing results on UGC texts.

  5. 5.

    https://wordnet.princeton.edu.

  6. 6.

    http://babelnet.org.

  7. 7.

    Solr is an open source enterprise search platform built on Apache Lucene. Please refer to http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ for more information.

  8. 8.

    http://infolingu.univ-mlv.fr/DonneesLinguistiques/Dictionnaires/dela-en-public.zip.

  9. 9.

    http://conceptnet5.media.mit.edu.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Collaborative Research Centre On-The-Fly Computing (SFB 901).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Heinz Nixdorf Institute, University of Paderborn, Fürstenallee 11, 33102, Paderborn, Germany

    Frederik S. Bäumer & Michaela Geierhos

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  1. Frederik S. Bäumer
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  2. Michaela Geierhos
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Correspondence to Frederik S. Bäumer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Kaunas University of Technology , Kaunas, Lithuania

    Giedre Dregvaite

  2. Kaunas University of Technology , Kaunas, Lithuania

    Robertas Damasevicius

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Bäumer, F.S., Geierhos, M. (2016). Running Out of Words: How Similar User Stories Can Help to Elaborate Individual Natural Language Requirement Descriptions. In: Dregvaite, G., Damasevicius, R. (eds) Information and Software Technologies. ICIST 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 639. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46254-7_44

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46254-7_44

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