The case for dumb requirements engineering tools

Abstract

[Context and Motivation] This paper notes the advanced state of the natural language (NL) processing art and considers four broad categories of tools for processing NL requirements documents. These tools are used in a variety of scenarios. The strength of a tool for a NL processing task is measured by its recall and precision. [Question/Problem] In some scenarios, for some tasks, any tool with less than 100% recall is not helpful and the user may be better off doing the task entirely manually. [Principal Ideas/Results] The paper suggests that perhaps a dumb tool doing an identifiable part of such a task may be better than an intelligent tool trying but failing in unidentifiable ways to do the entire task. [Contribution] Perhaps a new direction is needed in research for RE tools. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.