Joint Impact of Agents and Services in Enhancing Software Requirements Engineering

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) is a significant aspect of system development stages in generating reliable software (SW). Despite RE’s decisive impact on project success, SW systems still fail since there is a perplexity in sorting out requirements correctly. Researchers have tried several paradigms to deal with the specified challenges, such as agent-oriented RE (AORE), model-based RE, and service-oriented RE (SORE). By investigating the limitations of the independent use of these paradigms, this research sets an objective that proposes a framework which integrates the two paradigms (agent and service) on top of social media to enhance the SW RE processes. Thus, the research addresses challenges in gathering adequate requirements, detecting alignment between business requirements and SW products, prioritizing requirements, and recommending innovative ideas. The research has mainly adopted an empirical research methodology for SW engineering. Accordingly, two distinct expert groups have been formed based on their previous experience in AORE and SORE, respectively. The experts have been selected from enterprises and academic institutions, and they participated in our case study. After performing the necessary assessment based on specified criteria, those experts in the first group have reported that CASCRE (Collaboration of Agents and Services for Crowd-based Requirements Engineering) with a score of 93.7% is found to be better than that of AORE with a score of 88.7%. Moreover, experts in the second group have declared that CASCRE, with a score of 92.3%, is better than SORE, with a score of 83.7%. In both cases, improvements have been observed, which reveals that the synergy of the CASCRE features has a better impact on the RE process than utilizing individual approaches. Moreover, in order to demonstrate the applicability of CASCRE, feedback has been gathered from a focused crowd of local pharmaceuticals using a mini-prototype. Accordingly, 250 requirements related comments have been gathered from the discussion forum, and 1400 keywords were generated. Then, after performing a sentiment analysis using NLP algorithms, the result was demonstrated to experts. Therefore, 93% of gurus strongly agreed on the applicability of CASCRE in real projects.