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Identifying duplicate functionality in textual use cases by aligning semantic actions

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Abstract

Developing high-quality requirements specifications often demands a thoughtful analysis and an adequate level of expertise from analysts. Although requirements modeling techniques provide mechanisms for abstraction and clarity, fostering the reuse of shared functionality (e.g., via UML relationships for use cases), they are seldom employed in practice. A particular quality problem of textual requirements, such as use cases, is that of having duplicate pieces of functionality scattered across the specifications. Duplicate functionality can sometimes improve readability for end users, but hinders development-related tasks such as effort estimation, feature prioritization, and maintenance, among others. Unfortunately, inspecting textual requirements by hand in order to deal with redundant functionality can be an arduous, time-consuming, and error-prone activity for analysts. In this context, we introduce a novel approach called ReqAligner that aids analysts to spot signs of duplication in use cases in an automated fashion. To do so, ReqAligner combines several text processing techniques, such as a use case-aware classifier and a customized algorithm for sequence alignment. Essentially, the classifier converts the use cases into an abstract representation that consists of sequences of semantic actions, and then these sequences are compared pairwise in order to identify action matches, which become possible duplications. We have applied our technique to five real-world specifications, achieving promising results and identifying many sources of duplication in the use cases.

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Notes

  1. OpenNLP: available at http://opennlp.apache.org.

  2. Stanford CoreNLP: available at http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/corenlp.shtml.

  3. Snowball: Available at http://snowball.tartarus.org.

  4. Mate-Tools: available at http://code.google.com/p/mate-tools/.

  5. Available at http://www.ranks.nl/resources/stopwords.html.

  6. Mulan: Available at http://mulan.sourceforge.net/.

  7. The projects and the use cases used for the training phase were developed by System Engineering students, in the context of a Software Development Methodologies course taught at UNICEN University in 2011 and 2012.

  8. Please note that this schema is more rigorous than a traditional k-fold cross-validation evaluation, in which the dataset is partitioned in k-1 subsets for training and just 1 subset for testing.

  9. http://jaligner.sourceforge.net.

  10. Software Development Studio (SDS) Development Server—http://sds.cs.put.poznan.pl.

  11. To reduce confounding factors, we ensured these analysts had a college degree in Software Engineering with a solid academic background. Moreover, the final meeting between the four of them allowed us to manage the different learning curves which might have affected their findings.

  12. Because it exploits peculiarities in the domain of use cases, especially of textual use case specifications.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Paula Frade and Miguel Ruival, who implemented the ReqAligner prototype and evaluated the technique as part of their final project for the degree of Bachelor in Systems Engineering at UNICEN University. Also, the authors are grateful to the analysts who defined the reference solution for the evaluation of the technique. The authors also thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback that helped to improve the quality of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISISTAN Research Institute, UNICEN University, Paraje Arroyo Seco, Tandil, Argentina

    Alejandro Rago, Claudia Marcos & J. Andres Diaz-Pace

  2. CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Alejandro Rago & J. Andres Diaz-Pace

  3. CIC, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Claudia Marcos

Authors
  1. Alejandro Rago
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  2. Claudia Marcos
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  3. J. Andres Diaz-Pace
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Alejandro Rago, Claudia Marcos or J. Andres Diaz-Pace.

Additional information

Communicated by Prof. Daniel Amyot.

This work was partially supported by ANPCyT, CONICET and CIC (Argentina) through PICT Project 2010 No. 2247, PIP Project 2012- 2014 No. 11220110100078, and Project No. 813/13, respectively.

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Rago, A., Marcos, C. & Diaz-Pace, J.A. Identifying duplicate functionality in textual use cases by aligning semantic actions. Softw Syst Model 15, 579–603 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-014-0431-3

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