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Merging individual conceptual models of requirements

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Abstract

While it is acknowledged that system requirements will never be complete, incompleteness is often due to an inadequate process and methods for acquiring and tracking a representative set of requirements. Viewpoint development has been proposed to address these problems. We offer a viewpoint development approach that fits easily into the current practice of capturing requirements as use case descriptions. However, current practice does not support visualization of use case descriptions, the capture of multiple use case descriptions, the modeling of conflicts and the reconciliation of viewpoints. In our approach we apply techniques from natural language processing, term subsumption and set-theory to automatically convert the use case descriptions into a line diagram. The visualisation of use case descriptions is a natural addition to the object-oriented design of systems using the Unified Modelling Language where diagrams act as communication and validation devices. RECOCASE is a comprehensive methodology that includes use case description guidelines, a controlled language to support natural language translation, a requirements engineering process model and a tool to assist the specification and reconciliation of requirements. Our approach combines group and individual processes to minimise contradictions and missing information and maximise ownership of the requirements models. In this paper we describe each of the parts of our methodology following an example through each section.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many (and growing numbers) who have contributed to this work. Thanks to Tim Menzies for initial discussions that started this work in 1997, Kathrin Boettger for her hard work in developing many of the ideas, starting development of RECOCASE-tool, developing RECOCASE-logic and getting the natural language part working, Oscar Aguilera who continues to develop RECOCASE-tool and assist in evaluations, and Rolf Schwitter and Diego Molla for assisting the natural language work. Thanks Rolf for the RECOCASE name. Thanks to Didar Zowghi for her comments on this work and drafts of papers related to this work. Thanks to Daniel Garratt and David Hood for conducting evaluations of the group process (results not in). Thanks to the hundreds of students who have participated in evaluations. Thanks to the Australian Research Council for funding this work. I needed you all. Thanks.

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  1. Department of Computing, Division of Information and Communication Sciences, Macquarie University, 2109, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Debbie Richards

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  1. Debbie Richards
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Correspondence to Debbie Richards.

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Richards, D. Merging individual conceptual models of requirements . Requirements Eng 8, 195–205 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-002-0158-5

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