Requirements sensemaking using concept maps

Authors: Faily, S., Lyle, J., Paul, A., Atzeni, A., Blomme, D., Desruelle, H. and Bangalore, K.

Journal: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Volume: 7623 LNCS

Pages: 217-232

eISSN: 1611-3349

ISBN: 9783642343469

ISSN: 0302-9743

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-34347-6_13

Abstract:

Requirements play an important role in software engineering, but their perceived usefulness means that they often fail to be properly maintained. Traceability is often considered a means for motivating and maintaining requirements, but this is difficult without a better understanding of the requirements themselves. Sensemaking techniques help us get this understanding, but the representations necessary to support it are difficult to create, and scale poorly when dealing with medium to large scale problems. This paper describes how, with the aid of supporting software tools, concept mapping can be used to both make sense of and improve the quality of a requirements specification. We illustrate this approach by using it to update the requirements specification for the EU webinos project, and discuss several findings arising from our results. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

Source: Scopus