Implementation of an efficient requirements-analysis supporting system using similarity measure techniques

As software becomes more complicated and larger, the software engineer's requirements-analysis becomes an important and uneasy activity. This paper proposes a requirements-analysis supporting system that supports informal requirements-analysis. The proposed system measures the similarity between requirement sentences to identify possible redundancies and inconsistencies, and extracts the possible ambiguous requirements. The similarity measurement method combines a sliding window model and a parser model. Using these methods, the proposed system supports to trace dependency between documents and improve quality of requirement sentences. Efficiency of the proposed system and a process for requirement specification analysis using the system are presented. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.