research-article

A clustering-based approach for discovering flaws in requirements specifications

Authors:

Alessio Ferrari,

Stefania Gnesi,

Gabriele TolomeiAuthors Info & Claims

SAC '12: Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

Pages 1043 - 1050

https://doi.org/10.1145/2245276.2231939

Published: 26 March 2012 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we present the application of a clustering algorithm to exploit lexical and syntactic relationships occurring between natural language requirements. Our experiments conducted on a real-world data set highlight a correlation between clustering outliers, i.e., requirements that are marked as "noisy" by the clustering algorithm, and requirements presenting "flaws". Those flaws may refer to an incomplete explanation of the behavioral aspects, which the requirement is supposed to provide. Furthermore, flaws may also be caused by the usage of inconsistent terminology in the requirement specification. We evaluate the ability of our proposed algorithm to effectively discover such kind of flawed requirements. Evaluation is performed by measuring the accuracy of the algorithm in detecting a set of flaws in our testing data set, which have been previously manually-identified by a human assessor.

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Cited By

Vilela JGoncalves EHolanda ACastro JFigueiredo B(2016)A retrospective analysis of SAC requirementsACM SIGAPP Applied Computing Review10.1145/2993231.299323416:2(26-41)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2993231.2993234
Misra JSengupta SPodder S(2016)Topic cohesion preserving requirements clusteringProceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering10.1145/2896995.2896998(22-28)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2896995.2896998
Barbosa RJanuario DSilva AMoraes RMartins P(2015)An Approach to Clustering and Sequencing of Textual RequirementsProceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks Workshops10.1109/DSN-W.2015.20(39-44)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/DSN-W.2015.20
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A clustering-based approach for discovering flaws in requirements specifications
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Retrieval tasks and goals
      1. Clustering and classification
  2. Information systems applications
    1. Data mining
      1. Clustering
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Requirements analysis

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SAC '12: Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

March 2012

2179 pages

ISBN:9781450308571

DOI:10.1145/2245276

Conference Chairs:
Sascha Ossowski
University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
,
Paola Lecca
The Microsoft Research - University of Trento COSBI, Italy

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 26 March 2012

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SAC 2012: ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

March 26 - 30, 2012

Trento, Italy

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SAC '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 270 of 1,056 submissions, 26%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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Cited By

Vilela JGoncalves EHolanda ACastro JFigueiredo B(2016)A retrospective analysis of SAC requirementsACM SIGAPP Applied Computing Review10.1145/2993231.299323416:2(26-41)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2993231.2993234
Misra JSengupta SPodder S(2016)Topic cohesion preserving requirements clusteringProceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering10.1145/2896995.2896998(22-28)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2896995.2896998
Barbosa RJanuario DSilva AMoraes RMartins P(2015)An Approach to Clustering and Sequencing of Textual RequirementsProceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks Workshops10.1109/DSN-W.2015.20(39-44)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/DSN-W.2015.20
Ferrari AGnesi STolomei G(2013)Using clustering to improve the structure of natural language requirements documentsProceedings of the 19th international conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality10.1007/978-3-642-37422-7_3(34-49)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-37422-7_3
Bruni EFerrari ASeyff NTolomei G(2012)Automatic analysis of multimodal requirementsProceedings of the 18th international conference on Requirements Engineering: foundation for software quality10.1007/978-3-642-28714-5_19(218-224)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-28714-5_19

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