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Visualizing User Story Requirements at Multiple Granularity Levels via Semantic Relatedness

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Conceptual Modeling (ER 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9974))

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Abstract

The majority of practitioners express software requirements using natural text notations such as user stories. Despite the readability of text, it is hard for people to build an accurate mental image of the most relevant entities and relationships. Even converting requirements to conceptual models is not sufficient: as the number of requirements and concepts grows, obtaining a holistic view of the requirements becomes increasingly difficult and, eventually, practically impossible. In this paper, we introduce and experiment with a novel, automated method for visualizing requirements—by showing the concepts the text references and their relationships—at different levels of granularity. We build on two pillars: (i) clustering techniques for grouping elements into coherent sets so that a simplified overview of the concepts can be created, and (ii) state-of-the-art, corpus-based semantic relatedness algorithms between words to measure the extent to which two concepts are related. We build a proof-of-concept tool and evaluate our approach by applying it to requirements from four real-world data sets.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://spacy.io/.

  2. 2.

    http://neurohub.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php/All_User_Stories.

  3. 3.

    https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/.

  4. 4.

    Determining the number of clusters is still a work-in-progress part of our approach.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/gglucass/Semantic-Similarity-Prototype.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Garm Lucassen, Fabiano Dalpiaz, Jan Martijn E. M. van der Werf & Sjaak Brinkkemper

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  1. Garm Lucassen
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  2. Fabiano Dalpiaz
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  3. Jan Martijn E. M. van der Werf
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  4. Sjaak Brinkkemper
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Correspondence to Garm Lucassen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. CEDRIC-CNAM & ESSEC Business School, Cergy-Pontoise, France

    Isabelle Comyn-Wattiau

  2. Kyoto University , Kyoto, Japan

    Katsumi Tanaka

  3. Drexel University , Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Il-Yeol Song

  4. Nagoya University , Nagoya, Japan

    Shuichiro Yamamoto

  5. Tokyo Institute of Technology , Tokyo, Japan

    Motoshi Saeki

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Lucassen, G., Dalpiaz, F., van der Werf, J.M.E.M., Brinkkemper, S. (2016). Visualizing User Story Requirements at Multiple Granularity Levels via Semantic Relatedness. In: Comyn-Wattiau, I., Tanaka, K., Song, IY., Yamamoto, S., Saeki, M. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9974. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46397-1_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46397-1_35

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