Proposed Framework to Manage Software Requirements and Reuse

Abstract

Requirement elicitation and analysis form the focal point in the initial stages of the software development process. Unfortunately, in many software development projects, developers and end-users speak different languages. On one hand, end-users prefer to use natural languages while software developers who are technically perceptive, tend to use conceptual models. This difference in technical knowledge creates a communication gap, a potential cause of poor quality software products or project conflicts. The aim of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of a novel technique that seeks to foster effective elicitation of software requirements and support the implementation of structures that match particular requirements. By combining requirement elicitation and re-usable parts, the proposed solution envisages improvements in the overall software design process leading to enhanced requirement specifications. The novel idea is to incorporate an intermediate step for mapping Unified Modeling Language (UML) to Web Ontology Language (OWL) to enable the addition of ontology languages. The proposed model is validated through a survey. The validation results show that the proposed solution allows software developers to elicit software requirements and implement structures that match certain requirements.