ReComP: um Framework para apoiar a melhoria da comunicação de requisitos baseado em perspectivas

Abstract

Context/Motivation: Communication of requirements is essential in software development projects. When specifying software requirements, the requirements engineer must consider the information needed to meet each role's perspective in the development team to mitigate, to eliminate, or to avoid issues due to inadequate or insufficient communication. Objective: The goal of this research is to support the improvement of requirements communication, carried out through requirements specification artifacts, considering different perspectives of the development team members. To achieve this goal, we created the ReComP - Framework of Requirements Communication based on Perspectives. ReComP helps to identify problems in the artifacts used to communicate requirements within the software development team and provides suggestions for improvements to communication problems found in the artifacts. Method: We used the Design Science Research (DSR) research method. Exploratory research, using Snowballing, and a Systematic Mapping of the Literature, allowed us to identify requirements communication problems within software development teams and in artifacts used to communicate requirements. Two exploratory studies also contributed to a better understanding of communication problems: (i) a comparative study between types of specification (use cases and user stories), and (ii) an observation study with use cases. After that, we created the first version of ReComP. To evaluate and to evolve it, we conducted two empirical studies in academia, considering the developers' perspective using user stories and the testers' perspective using use cases. Then, we created the support tool ReComP-web and conducted a participative case study in the industry considering developers and testers' perspectives using prototypes. Results: The results show evidence that the use of ReComP helped to improve requirements communication between team members by identifying problems and by improving specifications. In both empirical studies and in the participative case study, the improvement in requirements specifications used during team's communication was over 70%. Conclusion: After being used by about 120 people in different studies, ReComP purpose is considered fulfilled.