This demo introduces an automated collaborative requirements engineering tool, called TestMEReq, which is used to promote effective communication and collaboration between client-stakeholders and requirements engineers for better requirements validation. Our tool is augmented with real time communication and collaboration support to allow multiple stakeholders to collaboratively validate the same set of requirements. We have conducted a user study focusing on validating requirements using TestMEReq with a few groups of requirements engineers and client stakeholders. The study shows that our automated tool support is able to assist requirements engineers to effectively communicate with client-stakeholders to better validate the requirements virtually in real time. (Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sWLOx-N4Jo).

Requirements validation is a crucial process to determine whether client-stakeholders' needs and expectations of a product are sufficiently correct and complete. Various requirements validation techniques have been used to evaluate the correctness and quality of requirements, but most of these techniques are tedious, expensive and time consuming. Accordingly, most project members are reluctant to invest their time and efforts in the requirements validation process. Moreover, automated tool supports that promote effective collaboration between the client-stakeholders and the engineers are still lacking. In this paper, we describe a novel approach that combines prototyping and test-based requirements techniques to improve the requirements validation process and promote better communication and collaboration between requirements engineers and client-stakeholders. To justify the potential of this prototype tool, we also present three types of evaluation conducted on the prototpye tool, which are the usability survey, 3-tool comparison analysis and expert reviews.

Within the era of globalisation that acknowledges differences and diversity, multiple languages have been increasingly used to capture requirements. This practice is particularly prevalent in Malaysia, where both Malay and English languages are used as a media of communication. Nevertheless, capturing requirements in multiple languages is often error-prone due to natural language imprecision being compounded by language differences. Considering that two languages may be used to describe requirements for the same system in different ways, we were motivated to develop MEReq, a tool which uses Essential Use Case (EUC) models to support capturing and checking the inconsistency occurring in English and Malay multi-lingual requirements. MEReq is tablet compatible to minimise time for on-site capture and validation of multi-lingual requirements. This paper describes the MEReq approach and demonstrates its use to capture and validate English and Malay requirements.

Requirements captured by Requirements Engineers are commonly inconsistent with their client’s intended requirements and are often error prone especially if the requirements are written in multiple languages. We demonstrate the use of our automated inconsistency-checking tool MaramaAI to capture and manage the consistency of multi-lingual requirements in both the English and Malay languages for requirements engineers and clients using a round-trip, rapid prototyping approach.

Requirements are typically modelled in natural language, leading to inconsistencies, incompleteness and incorrectness due to inherent natural language ambiguities and lack of precise modelling rules. In previous work, we developed a technique and toolset to support extraction of requirements from English text and supporting semi-formal modelling and roundtrip refinement using Essential use cases, helping to mitigate some of these problems. In this paper we describe new work applying this human-centric approach to requirements engineering to the Malay language. We describe an extension of our original Essential Use Cases toolset to support requirements modelling in the Malay language essential interaction modelling, and results of a preliminary experiment to gauge our tool's effectiveness in supporting Malay natural language extraction and round-trip requirements refinement.

Requirements specifications need to be checked against the 3C's - Consistency, Completeness and Correctness - in order to achieve high quality. This is especially difficult when working with both natural language requirements and associated semi-formal modelling representations. We describe a technique and support tool that allows us to perform semi-automated checking of natural language and semi-formal requirements models, supporting both consistency management between representations but also correctness and completeness analysis. We use a concept of essential use case interaction patterns to perform the correctness and completeness analysis on the semi-formal representation. We highlight potential inconsistencies, incompleteness and incorrectness using visual differencing in our support tool. We have evaluated our approach via an end user study which focused on the tool's usefulness, ease of use, ease of learning and user satisfaction and provided data for cognitive dimensions of notations analysis of the tool.

Requirements need to be validated at an early stage of analysis to address inconsistency and incompleteness issues. Capturing requirements usually involves natural language analysis, which is often imprecise and error prone, or translation into formal models, which are difficult for non-technical stakeholders to understand and use. Users often best understand proposed software systems from the likely user interface they will present. To this end we describe novel automated tool support for capturing requirements as Essential Use Cases and translating these into “Essential User Interface” low-fidelity rapid prototypes. We describe our automated tool supporting requirements capture, lo-fi user interface prototype generation and consistency management.

Consistency checking needs to be done from the earliest phase of requirements capture as requirements captured by requirement engineers are often vague, error-prone and inconsistent with users' needs. To improve such consistency checking we have applied a traceability approach with visualization capability. We have embedded this into a light-weight automated tracing tool in order to allow users to capture their requirements and generate Essential Use Case models of these requirements automatically. Our tool supports inconsistency checking between textual requirements, abstract interactions that derive from the text and Essential Use Case models. A preliminary evaluation has been conducted with target end users and the tool usefulness and ease of use are evaluated. We describe our motivation for this research, our prototype tool and results of our evaluation.

Capturing software requirements from clients often leads to error prone and vague requirements documents. To surmount this issue, requirements engineers often choose to use UML models to capture their requirements. In this paper we discuss the use of Essential Use Cases (EUCs) as an alternative, user-centric representation which was developed to ease the process of capturing and describing requirements. However, EUCs are not commonly used in practice because, to our knowledge, no suitable tool support has been developed. In addition, requirements engineers face difficulties in finding the correct 'essential' requirements (abstract interactions) in a time efficient manner. In order to overcome these problems, we have developed a prototype tool for automated tracing of abstract interactions. We describe the tool and compare the performance and correctness of the results provided by it to that of manual essential use case extraction efforts by a group of requirements engineers. The results of an end user study of the tool's usefulness and ease of use are also discussed.

Requirements are commonly vague and ambiguous. In this paper, we describe an automated Inconsistency Checker called MaramaAI for checking for high-level inconsistency between textual requirements, abstract interactions and Essential Use Cases. We use concepts of phrase extraction and essential interaction patterns to carry out these checks. We provide further support for checking of requirements quality attributes such as completeness and correctness using visual differencing.

Handling inconsistency in software requirements is a complicated task which has attracted the interest of many groups of researchers. Formal and semi-formal specifications often have inconsistencies in the depicted requirements that need to be managed and resolved. This is particularly challenging when refining informal to formalized requirements. We propose an automated tool with traceability and consistency checking techniques to support analysis of requirements and traceability between different representations: textual, visual, informal and formal.