Requirements engineering is a key activity in ICT projects as it is essential to understand what users need. What requirements satisfy them? What trade-offs are acceptable for users and other stakeholders?
To find out answers, Juha Tiihonen and Tomi Männistö from the Department of Computer Science got funding for a new EU Horizon 2020 project called OPENREQ – Intelligent Recommendation & Decision Technologies for community-driven requirements engineering. The EU funding is for three years.
OPENREQ will work towards a fully integrated open-source requirements management platform into which the scientists will leverage modern recommender algorithms, semantic technologies, data-mining and inference technologies. These will provide intelligent, proactive support for stakeholders’ decision making both individually or as groups.
The platform will focus on complex, community-driven ICT projects with various dependencies and stakeholders as in the Telecom, Transportation, and Cross-Platform Software domains covered in trials.
New software capabilities will be integrated into stakeholders’ workflows
The researchers will develop, evaluate and disseminate requirements intelligence, stakeholder’s personal recommender and dependency management.
The expectations for the future include requirements intelligence that monitors the actual software usage and collects stakeholders’ and users’ feedback, e.g., from social media. These will be aggregated and visualized as predictive analytics.
A stakeholder’s personal recommender implements advanced recommendation and machine-learning algorithms to assist requirements work, improve a requirement’s quality, estimate its properties such as implementation effort or predict relevant stakeholders.
Again, dependency management will semi-automatically identify requirements dependencies, support requirements reasoning and reuse requirements knowledge.
-With the OPENREQ Interfaces, these capabilities will be integrated into stakeholders’ workflows and tools including requirements tools, issues trackers and collaboration tools, says Juha Tiihonen, who is mainly working on the dependency management.
Partners:
- Coordinator: Hamburger Informatik Technologie- Center EV (HITEC), Germany
- Technische Universität Graz, Austria
- Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
- University of Helsinki, Finland
- Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, Italy
- Hutchinson Tre Italia, Italy
- Siemens Österreich , Austria
- The Qt Company, Finland
- Vogella ,Germany