The ReqWiki Approach for Collaborative Software Requirements Engineering with Integrated Text Analysis Support

The requirements engineering phase within a software project is a heavily knowledge-driven, collaborative process that typically involves the analysis and creation of a large number of textual artifacts. We know that requirements engineering has a large impact on the success of a project, yet sophisticated tool support, especially for small to mid-size enterprises, is still lacking. We present Reqwiki, a novel open source web-based approach based on a semantic wiki that includes natural language processing (NLP) assistants, which work collaboratively with humans on the requirements specification documents. We evaluated Reqwiki with a number of software engineers to investigate the impact of our novel semantic support on software requirements engineering. Our user studies prove that (i) software engineers unfamiliar with NLP can easily leverage these assistants and (ii) semantic assistants can help to significantly improve the quality of requirements specifications.