Text Analysis for Requirements Engineering- Application of Computational Linguistics

Requirements Engineering is the Achilles heel of the whole softwaredevelopment process. It involves many stakeholders and includes not onlytechnical but also sociological and psychological activities. Even when all thestakeholders come to a consensus the produced requirements are ratherinformal. In the early project phases the functionality of the prospectivesoftware is not yet understood in the precision necessary for formalizationwhich makes requirements formalization not only a refinement but also alearning process. To facilitate this learning process this book proposes anovel approach to the extraction of a domain ontology from requirementsdocuments in order to establish a common language for the projectstakeholders. An ontology consists of a set of terms and relations betweenthese terms. As compared to a glossary a domain-specific ontology gives amore explicit definition of terms and relations between them. When theontology is extracted a domain expert validates it. The validated ontologybecomes both the common language for all the project stakeholders and avaluable resource for later development steps.