A semantic and collaborative platform for agile requirements evolution

The characteristics of web-based and community-oriented social software are very useful in the context of software engineering in general and requirements engineering in particular. Their ease of use, transparency of communication, user orientation, self organization and emergent nature resulting from a continual social feedback are particularly relevant to an agile requirements definition exercise. The reason is that agile requirements are inherently meant to be collaboration-intensive. However, while the benefits of social platforms are valuable, they are necessary and not sufficient in themselves for making the exercise effective. The emerging social software engineering discipline is about enabling community-driven creation, management and deployment of software by applying methods, processes and tools in online environments. In this paper, we report our work on a semantic and collaborative platform that combines the virtues of social software principles and the semantic web concepts to enable knowledge-assisted agile requirements definition.