Change impact analysis for Natural Language requirements: An NLP approach

Chetan Arora, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Arda Goknil, Lionel C. Briand, Frank Zimmer
2015 2015 IEEE 23rd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)  
Requirements are subject to frequent changes as a way to ensure that they reflect the current best understanding of a system, and to respond to factors such as new and evolving needs. Changing one requirement in a requirements specification may warrant further changes to the specification, so that the overall correctness and consistency of the specification can be maintained. A manual analysis of how a change to one requirement impacts other requirements is time-consuming and presents a
more » ... e for large requirements specifications. We propose an approach based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for analyzing the impact of change in Natural Language (NL) requirements. Our focus on NL requirements is motivated by the prevalent use of these requirements, particularly in industry. Our approach automatically detects and takes into account the phrasal structure of requirements statements. We argue about the importance of capturing the conditions under which change should propagate to enable more accurate change impact analysis. We propose a quantitative measure for calculating how likely a requirements statement is to be impacted by a change under given conditions. We conduct an evaluation of our approach by applying it to 14 change scenarios from two industrial case studies. Index Terms-Change Impact Analysis, Natural Language Requirements, Natural Language Processing (NLP). R1: The mission operation controller shall transmit satellite status reports to the user help desk document repository. R2: The satellite management system shall provide users with the ability to transfer maintenance and service plans to the user help desk via FTP. R3: The mission operation controller shall transmit any detected anomalies to the user help desk. R4: The mission operation controller shall implement a configuration management database. R5 : The satellite management system shall provide a mechanism for updating user-defined parameters in the configuration database. R6: The satellite management system shall authorise all updates to the telemetry configuration of a satellite before applying the changes to the satellite telemetry database.
doi:10.1109/re.2015.7320403 dblp:conf/re/0002SGBZ15 fatcat:fkf3fxnh5zfpvjftb66houmpda