Requirements management with semantic technology: An empirical study on automated requirements categorization and conflict analysis

Abstract

Requirements managers aim at keeping the set of requirements consistent and up to date throughout the project by conducting the following tasks: requirements categorization, requirements conflict analysis, and requirements tracing. However, the manual conduct of these tasks takes significant effort and is error-prone. In this paper we propose to use semantic technology as foundation for automating the requirements management tasks and introduce the ontology-based reporting approach OntRep. We evaluate the effectiveness and effort the OntRep approach based on a real-world industrial empirical study with professional Austrian IT project managers. Major results were that OntRep provides reasonable capabilities for the automated categorization of requirements, was when compared to a manual approach considerably more effective to identify conflicts, and produced less false positives with similar effort. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.