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Relationship analysis in requirements engineering

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Abstract

This research addresses a major shortcoming in today’s requirements analysis techniques—the lack of a rigorous and comprehensive process to explicitly capture the relationship structure of the problem domain. Whereas other analysis techniques lightly address the relationship discovery process, relationship analysis (RA) is a systematic, domain-independent analysis technique focusing exclusively on a domain’s relationship structure. This paper describes RA’s taxonomy of relationship types and corresponding brainstorming questions for eliciting the relationship structure from a domain expert. A preliminary case study analysis of online bookstores using RA as well as a formal experiment have both confirmed RA’s effectiveness in helping the analyst produce significantly higher quality requirements. RA should become an invaluable tool for analysts, irrespective of the software engineering approach taken during systems analysis.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Ashish Ghoda, Il Im, Robb Klashner, and Atanu Pal for their assistance with this RA research. We gratefully appreciate partial funding support for this research by the United Parcel Service, the New Jersey Center for Pervasive Information Technology, the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology, and the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-0135531 and DUE-0226075.

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Correspondence to Michael Bieber.

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Yoo, J., Catanio, J., Paul, R. et al. Relationship analysis in requirements engineering. Requirements Eng 9, 238–247 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-004-0205-5

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