One‐ and two‐phase software requirement classification using ensemble deep learning

Abstract

Recently, deep learning (DL) has been utilized successfully in different fields, achieving remarkable results. Thus, there is a noticeable focus on DL approaches to automate software engineering (SE) tasks such as maintenance, requirement extraction, and classification. An advanced utilization of DL is the ensemble approach, which aims to reduce error rates and learning time and improve performance. In this research, three ensemble approaches were applied: accuracy as a weight ensemble, mean ensemble, and accuracy per class as a weight ensemble with a combination of four different DL models—long short‐term memory (LSTM), bidirectional long short‐term memory (BiLSTM), a gated recurrent unit (GRU), and a convolutional neural network (CNN)—in order to classify the software requirement (SR) specification, the binary classification of SRs into functional requirement (FRs) or non‐functional requirements (NFRs), and the multi‐label classification of both FRs and NFRs into further experimental classes. The models were trained and tested on the PROMISE dataset. A one‐phase classification system was developed to classify SRs directly into one of the 17 multi‐classes of FRs and NFRs. In addition, a two‐phase classification system was developed to classify SRs first into FRs or NFRs and to pass the output to the second phase of multi-class classification to 17 classes. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed classification systems can lead to a competitive classification performance compared to the state‐of‐the‐art methods. The two‐phase classification system proved its robustness against the one‐phase classification system, as it obtained a 95.7% accuracy in the binary classification phase and a 93.4% accuracy in the second phase of NFR and FR multi‐class classification.