Section: New Results

Requirement Engineering

Participants : Isabelle Mirbel, Zeina Azmeh.

The participation of stakeholders (and especially end-users) in requirement engineering is recognized as a key element in the development of useful and usable systems. But in practice, the involvement of end-users is often difficult to implement. Today's Web has given rise to several platforms serving the purpose of collaborative software development. Thanks to these environments, it is possible, among others, for anyone to suggest new requirements for a software under development. A lot of requirements are thus proposed by users and it becomes difficult, after a while, for the persons in charge of the software which development is hosted by the platform to understand this large set of new requirements in its entirety. An important limitation of these new approaches resides in the information overload, lacking structure and semantics.

In this context, we proposed an approach based on Semantic Web languages as well as concept lattices to identify relevant groups of stakeholders depending on their past participation. We also developped a tool supporting this approach. This work relies on Semantic Web languages and formal concept analysis. Semantic Web languages are used to annotate the data extracted from the plateform and to reason about it. Formal Concept Analysis is a theory of data analysis which identifies conceptual structures among data sets. We use it to classify users as well as requirements into lattices which can then be exploited as road maps to examine new requirements. The results of this research have been published in [24] .