Mining Associations Between Quality Concerns and Functional Requirements

The cost and effort of developing software systems in a new technical area can be extensive. An organization must perform a domain analysis to discover competing products, analyze their architectures and features, and ultimately discover and specify product requirements. However, delivering high quality products, depends not only on gaining an understanding of functional requirements, but also of qualities such as performance, reliability, security, and usability. Discovering such concerns early in the requirements process drives architectural design decisions. This paper extends our prior work on mining functional requirements from large collections of domain documents, by proposing and evaluating a new technique for discovering and specifying quality concerns related to specific functional components. We evaluate our approach against three domains of Positive Train Control, Electronic Health Records, and Medical Infusion Pumps, and show that it significantly outperforms a basic information retrieval approach. Finally we classified the forms of retrieved information, discussed the utility of different types, and conducted a small study with an experienced engineer to investigate the quality of requirements produced using our approach.