Building the Structure of Specification Documents from Utterances of Requirements Elicitation Meetings
Nobuyuki Miura†
Haruhiko Kaiya‡
Motoshi Saeki§
†NTT Software Laboratories (This research was carried at Tokyo Institute of Technology.)
‡Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Hokuriku
§Tokyo Institute of Technology
In the process of requirements elicitation in software development,
it is usual that participants with different roles
have the series of meetings and
requirements analysts compose specification documents between the meetings.
There are many studies for supporting these processes,
such as cooperative working models in meetings, tools based on those models,
and specification ¥& design methods such as Structured Analysis and
Object-Oriented Analysis.
However there are no studies how to describe specification documents based on
contents of meetings.
Participants communicate verbally with each other,
so we consider that the effective method
should be based on verbal histories, i.e. utterances appearing in meetings.
We propose a method to write specification documents
considering that structures of meetings is reflected into structures of
specification documents.
Briefly speaking, the assumed basis of our method is that
analysts put pairs of subsequently discussed topics (we call them
``temporally adjacent topics'') into
close positions in the tree structures of the specification documents.
In this paper, we also assess the feasibility and the
effectiveness of the method through several experiments and case studies.
Back to Papers at TIT Page
miura@slab.ntt.jp