Mining incoherent requirements in technical specifications: Analysis and implementation

摘要

Requirements are designed to specify the features of systems. Even for a simple system, several thousands of requirements produced by different authors are needed. Overlap and incoherence problems are frequently observed. In this article, we propose a method to construct a corpus of various types of incoherences and a categorization that leads to the definition of patterns to mine incoherent requirements. We focus in this contribution on incoherences (1) which can be detected solely from linguistic factors and (2) which concern pairs of requirements. Together, these represent about 60% of the different types of incoherences; the other types require extensive domain knowledge and reasoning. The second part of this article develops several language-based patterns to detect incoherent requirements in texts. An indicative evaluation of the results concludes this contribution. More generally, this contribution opens new perspectives on incoherence analysis in texts.