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Assisting requirements analysts to find latent concerns with REAssistant

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Abstract

Textual requirements are very common in software projects. However, this format of requirements often keeps relevant concerns (e.g., performance, synchronization, data access, etc.) from the analyst’s view because their semantics are implicit in the text. Thus, analysts must carefully review requirements documents in order to identify key concerns and their effects. Concern mining tools based on NLP techniques can help in this activity. Nonetheless, existing tools cannot always detect all the crosscutting effects of a given concern on different requirements sections, as this detection requires a semantic analysis of the text. In this work, we describe an automated tool called REAssistant that supports the extraction of semantic information from textual use cases in order to reveal latent crosscutting concerns. To enable the analysis of use cases, we apply a tandem of advanced NLP techniques (e.g, dependency parsing, semantic role labeling, and domain actions) built on the UIMA framework, which generates different annotations for the use cases. Then, REAssistant allows analysts to query these annotations via concern-specific rules in order to identify all the effects of a given concern. The REAssistant tool has been evaluated with several case-studies, showing good results when compared to a manual identification of concerns and a third-party tool. In particular, the tool achieved a remarkable recall regarding the detection of crosscutting concern effects.

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Notes

  1. We should note that including references to things besides pure functional behavior is not a recommended practice when writing use cases (Cockburn 2001), but yet analysts often include such information in real-life requirements documents.

  2. These actions refer to a use case step whose intention was the creation, modification or removal of some information/record in the system, respectively.

  3. http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/.

  4. http://uima.apache.org/.

  5. http://opennlp.sourceforge.net/projects.html.

  6. http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/corenlp.shtml.

  7. http://code.google.com/p/mate-tools/.

  8. http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/downloads/?project=query2.

  9. Available for trial at http://www.aosd-europe.net/deliverables/d108EAMinerVersion2.zip.

  10. Available at: http://code.google.com/p/reassistant/.

  11. Aside from the fact that, in the industry, it is hard to find available analysts willing to be part of empirical evaluations.

  12. Although these components can be parameterized, we chose to use default configurations for the experiments. Thus, all the components were packed into UIMA and used without setting any special parameters.

  13. Mulan: Available at http://mulan.sourceforge.net/.

  14. The golden standards, tools and human groups results used for this evaluation can be downloaded from our institutional webpage: http://www.exa.unicen.edu.ar/~arago.

  15. Apache UIMA Ruta (Rule-based Text Annotation): http://uima.apache.org/ruta.html.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by ANPCyT (Argentina) through PICT Project 2010 No. 2247. The authors are grateful to all the participants of the case-studies. The authors also thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback that helped to improve the quality of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISISTAN Research Institute, UNICEN University, Paraje Arroyo Seco, Tandil, Argentina

    Alejandro Rago, Claudia Marcos & J. Andres Diaz-Pace

  2. CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Alejandro Rago & J. Andres Diaz-Pace

  3. CIC, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Claudia Marcos

Authors
  1. Alejandro Rago
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  2. Claudia Marcos
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  3. J. Andres Diaz-Pace
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Correspondence to Alejandro Rago, Claudia Marcos or J. Andres Diaz-Pace.

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Rago, A., Marcos, C. & Diaz-Pace, J.A. Assisting requirements analysts to find latent concerns with REAssistant . Autom Softw Eng 23, 219–252 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-014-0156-0

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