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The Case for Dumb Requirements Engineering Tools

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Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7195))

Abstract

[Context and Motivation] This paper notes the advanced state of the natural language (NL) processing art and considers four broad categories of tools for processing NL requirements documents. These tools are used in a variety of scenarios. The strength of a tool for a NL processing task is measured by its recall and precision. [Question/Problem] In some scenarios, for some tasks, any tool with less than 100% recall is not helpful and the user may be better off doing the task entirely manually. [Principal Ideas/Results] The paper suggests that perhaps a dumb tool doing an identifiable part of such a task may be better than an intelligent tool trying but failing in unidentifiable ways to do the entire task. [Contribution] Perhaps a new direction is needed in research for RE tools.

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Berry, D., Gacitua, R., Sawyer, P., Tjong, S.F. (2012). The Case for Dumb Requirements Engineering Tools. In: Regnell, B., Damian, D. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7195. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28714-5_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28714-5_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-28713-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-28714-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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