Stakeholder Concern-Driven Requirements Analytics

Abstract

The requirements engineering (RE) process and resultant requirements usually inform and interact with downstream (e.g., design and testing) and side-stream (e.g., project management, quality management) processes in various ways. Each of these processes involves numerous internal stakeholders (e.g., managers, developers, architects, etc.) who, in turn, have different concerns with regard to the impact of requirements on their respective processes. In other words, the various stakeholders need different types of requirements information and measurements in order for them to manage, control, and track their respective process activities (e.g., design traceability information for architects, requirements progress for project managers, etc.). The burden of providing this information usually falls within the realm of the requirements management process. However, due to the lack of identified metrics and analytical methods, the process of providing the various stakeholders with the information that addresses their various concerns becomes cumbersome. This is further complicated by large project sizes, numerous stakeholders, time pressure, large numbers of requirements, other software artifacts, and others. This proposal aims to address this problem by proposing to provide stakeholders with concern-driven requirements analytics that will address their various concerns. We intend to achieve this through identifying metrics and analytical methods that can be readily used in the requirements management process. We further propose to provide the stakeholder with a dashboard that allows them to choose from the various requirements analytics options along with visualization techniques that would best visualize the data and address their concerns.