Joint Impact of Agents and Services in Enhancing Software Requirements Engineering

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...

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Main Authors: Mekuria Sinkie, Tor Morten Gronli, Dida Midekso, Abdullah Lakhan
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-09-01
Series:Electronics
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/12/18/3955
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author Mekuria Sinkie
Tor Morten Gronli
Dida Midekso
Abdullah Lakhan
author_facet Mekuria Sinkie
Tor Morten Gronli
Dida Midekso
Abdullah Lakhan
author_sort Mekuria Sinkie
collection DOAJ
description 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.
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spelling doaj.art-65cfe4b26b9440b3bbc5c0bbed049ade2023-11-19T10:23:43ZengMDPI AGElectronics2079-92922023-09-011218395510.3390/electronics12183955Joint Impact of Agents and Services in Enhancing Software Requirements EngineeringMekuria Sinkie0Tor Morten Gronli1Dida Midekso2Abdullah Lakhan3Department of Software Engineering, Addis Ababa Science and Technology University, Addis Ababa 16417, EthiopiaDepartment of Technology, Christiania University, 1190 Oslo, NorwayDepartment of Software Engineering, Addis Ababa Science and Technology University, Addis Ababa 16417, EthiopiaDepartment of Technology, Christiania University, 1190 Oslo, NorwayRequirements 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.https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/12/18/3955requirements elicitationagentsservicessocial mediaRE-processesframework
spellingShingle Mekuria Sinkie
Tor Morten Gronli
Dida Midekso
Abdullah Lakhan
Joint Impact of Agents and Services in Enhancing Software Requirements Engineering
Electronics
requirements elicitation
agents
services
social media
RE-processes
framework
title Joint Impact of Agents and Services in Enhancing Software Requirements Engineering
title_full Joint Impact of Agents and Services in Enhancing Software Requirements Engineering
title_fullStr Joint Impact of Agents and Services in Enhancing Software Requirements Engineering
title_full_unstemmed Joint Impact of Agents and Services in Enhancing Software Requirements Engineering
title_short Joint Impact of Agents and Services in Enhancing Software Requirements Engineering
title_sort joint impact of agents and services in enhancing software requirements engineering
topic requirements elicitation
agents
services
social media
RE-processes
framework
url https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/12/18/3955
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AT abdullahlakhan jointimpactofagentsandservicesinenhancingsoftwarerequirementsengineering