A tool to improve requirements review in collaborative software development platforms

Abstract

The Web has given rise to several platforms serving the purpose of collaborative software development. Thanks to these environments, it is possible for anyone to suggest new requirements for a software under development. A lot of requirements are thus proposed by stakeholders and it becomes difficult, after a while, for the persons in charge of the software under development to take advantage of this large set of requirements. In this context, our aim was to propose an approach to automatically group similar requirements together in order to improve the prioritization process. As requirements expressed on collaborative software development platforms are usually very short and their content not very structured, we proposed to exploit relationships between stakeholders and past requirements to break the whole set of new requirements into meaningful categories. In this paper, we present a tool which aim is to help decision makers to review a large set of requirements newly posted on a collaborative software development platform by identifying relevant groups of stakeholders depending on their past participation. This tool relies on (i) semantic web languages to annotate and reason on the data extracted from the platform and (ii) formal concept analysis to classify stakeholders as well as requirements into lattices which can then be exploited as road maps to examine newly posted requirements.