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Reducing Ambiguities in Requirements Specifications Via Automatically Created Object-Oriented Models

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Innovations for Requirement Analysis. From Stakeholders’ Needs to Formal Designs (Monterey Workshop 2007)

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Abstract

In industry, reviews and inspections are the primary methods to identify ambiguities, inconsistencies, and under specifications in natural language (NL) software requirements specifications (SRSs). However, humans have difficulties identifying ambiguities and tend to overlook inconsistencies in a large NL SRS. This paper presents a three-step, semi-automatic method, supported by a prototype tool, for identifying inconsistencies and ambiguities in NL SRSs. The method combines the strengths of automation and human reasoning to overcome difficulties with reviews and inspections. First, the tool parses a NL SRS according to a constraining grammar. Second, from relationships exposed in the parse, the tool creates the classes, methods, variables, and associations of an object-oriented analysis model of the specified system. Third, the model is diagrammed so that a human reviewer can use the model to detect ambiguities and inconsistencies. Since a human finds the problems, the tool has to have neither perfect recall nor perfect precision. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by applying it and the tool to a widely published example NL SRS. A separate study evaluates the tool’s domain-specific term detection.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Daniel Popescu & Nenad Medvidovic

  2. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Spencer Rugaber

  3. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Daniel M. Berry

Authors
  1. Daniel Popescu
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  2. Spencer Rugaber
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  3. Nenad Medvidovic
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  4. Daniel M. Berry
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 326, 61920, Heidelberg, Germany

    Barbara Paech

  2. Department of Computer Science, Naval Postgraduate School, 1411 Cunningham Road, CA 93943, Monterey, USA

    Craig Martell

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Popescu, D., Rugaber, S., Medvidovic, N., Berry, D.M. (2008). Reducing Ambiguities in Requirements Specifications Via Automatically Created Object-Oriented Models. In: Paech, B., Martell, C. (eds) Innovations for Requirement Analysis. From Stakeholders’ Needs to Formal Designs. Monterey Workshop 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5320. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89778-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89778-1_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-89777-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-89778-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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