Abstract
Context: The use of controlled vocabularies (CVs) aims to increase the quality of the specifications of the software requirements, by producing well-written documentation to reduce both ambiguities and complexity. Many studies suggest that defects introduced at the requirements engineering (RE) phase have a negative impact, significantly higher than defects in the later stages of the software development lifecycle. However, the knowledge we have about the impact of using CVs, in specific RE activities, is very scarce. Objective: To identify and classify the type of CVs, and the impact they have on the requirements engineering phase of software development. Method: A systematic mapping study, collecting empirical evidence that is published up to July 2019. Results: This work identified 2348 papers published pertinent to CVs and RE, but only 90 primary published papers were chosen as relevant. The process of data extraction revealed that 79 studies reported the use of ontologies, whereas the remaining 11 were focused on taxonomies. The activities of RE with greater empirical support were those of specification (29 studies) and elicitation (28 studies). Seventeen different impacts of the CVs on the RE activities were classified and ranked, being the two most cited: guidance and understanding (38%), and automation and tool support (22%). Conclusions: The evolution of the last 10 years in the number of published papers shows that interest in the use of CVs remains high. The research community has a broad representation, distributed across the five continents. Most of the research focuses on the application of ontologies and taxonomies, whereas the use of thesauri and folksonomies is less reported. The evidence demonstrates the usefulness of the CVs in all RE activities, especially during elicitation and specification, helping developers understand, facilitating the automation process and identifying defects, conflicts and ambiguities in the requirements. Collaboration in research between academic and industrial contexts is low and should be promoted.
Highlights
Requirements engineering (RE) is the foremost, human-centric, and crucial phase of the software development lifecycle, concerned with adequately eliciting, analyzing, validating, and managingAppl
For each of the research questions (RQs) we begin with a summary of the most notable outcomes, a brief discussion regarding the most pertinent aspects and, based on them, a suggestion of some explanatory hypotheses
No direct evidence was found for folksonomies or other terms that can be considered as controlled vocabularies (CVs)
Summary
Requirements engineering (RE) is the foremost, human-centric, and crucial phase of the software development lifecycle, concerned with adequately eliciting, analyzing, validating, and managingAppl. Requirements engineering (RE) is the foremost, human-centric, and crucial phase of the software development lifecycle, concerned with adequately eliciting, analyzing, validating, and managing. A controlled vocabulary is an organized collection of units of significance, i.e., terms that have determined and well-known meaning, without duplicates (synonyms) that can cause ambiguities or misunderstandings. Requirements engineering is the earliest process in software development, and the most crucial, since the following phases depend on it. It is necessary to have support methods, techniques and tools that guarantee the quality of the outcomes of the RE, reducing as much as possible the presence of inconsistencies, ambiguities, omissions or defects in the final specifications of the requirements [6]. In the last two decades, there has been a surge in the use of CVs in RE for improving the overall quality of both the development process and the final software product (system) [7–9,22–25].
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