Requirements-Collector: Automating Requirements Specification from Elicitation Sessions and User Feedback

Abstract

In the context of digital transformation, speeding up the time-to-market of high-quality software products is a big challenge. Software quality correlates with the success of requirements engineering (RE) sessions and the ability to collect feedback from end-users in an efficient, dynamic way. Thus, software analysts are tasked to collect all relevant material of RE sessions and user feedback, usually specified on written notes, flip charts, pictures, and user reviews. Afterward comprehensible requirements need to be specified for software implementation and testing. These activities are mostly performed manually, which causes process delays, with a negative effect on software quality attributes such as reliability, usability, comprehensibility. This paper presents Requirements-Collector, a tool for automating the tasks of requirements specification and user feedback analysis. Our tool involves machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) computational mechanisms enabling the automated classification of requirements discussed in RE meetings (stored in the form of audio recordings) and textual feedback in the form of user reviews. We use such techniques as they demonstrated to be quite effective in text classification problems. We argue that Requirements-Collector has the potential to renovate the role of software analysts, which can experience a substantial reduction of manual tasks, more efficient communication, dedication to more analytical tasks, and assurance of software quality from conception phases. The results of this work have shown that our tool is able to classify RE specifications and user review feedback with reliable accuracy.