1,720,971 research outputs found
Towards Supporting the Analysis of Online Discussions in OSS Communities: A Speech-Act Based Approach
No full textOpen-Source Software (OSS) community members report bugs, request features or clarifications by writing messages (in unstructured natural language) to mailing lists. Analysts examine them dealing with an effort demanding and error prone task, which requires reading huge threads of emails. Automated support for retrieving relevant information and particularly for recognizing discussants’ intentions (e.g., suggesting, complaining) can support analysts, and allow them to increase the performance of this task. Online discussions are almost synchronous written conversations that can be analyzed applying computational linguistic techniques that build on the speech act theory. Our approach builds on this observation. We propose to analyze OSS mailing-list discussions in terms of the linguistic and non-linguistic acts expressed by the participants, and provide a tool-supported speech-act analysis method. In this paper we describe this method and discuss how to empirically evaluate it. We discuss the results of the first execution of an empirical study that involved 20 subjects
Providing Foundation for User Feedback Concepts by Extending a Communication Ontology
No full textThe term user feedback is becoming widely used in requirements engineering (RE) research to refer to the comments and evaluations that users express upon having experienced the use of a software application or service. This explicit feedback takes place in virtual spaces (e.g., issue tracking systems, app stores), aiming, for instance, at reporting on discovered bugs or requesting new features. Founding the notion of explicit user feedback with the use of an ontology may support a deep understanding of the feedback nature, as well as contribute to the development of tool-components for its analysis at use of requirements analysts. In this paper, we present a user feedback ontology as an extension of an existing communication ontology. We describe how we built it, along with a set of competency questions, and illustrate its applicability on an example taken from a collaborative communication related to RE for software evolution
A Goal-oriented Analysis to Guide the Development of a User Feedback Ontology
No full textNowadays, developers and service providers put a lot of effort on collecting and analyzing user feedback with the purpose of improving their applications and services. This motivates the proposal of new tools to collect and analyze feedback. In our work, we develop a user feedback ontology, aimed at clarifying the concepts of this domain. For that, we follow a goal-oriented methodology to identify the competency questions that represent the ontology requirements. In this paper, we discuss an excerpt of the goal model used to guide the development of our ontology. Moreover, we present examples of competency questions identified through the analysis, and the corresponding fragment of the user feedback ontology
Speech-acts based analysis for requirements discovery from online discussions
No full textOnline discussions about software applications and services that take place on web-based communication platforms represent an invaluable knowledge source for diverse software engineering tasks, including requirements elicitation. The amount of research work on developing effective tool-supported analysis methods is rapidly increasing, as part of the so called software analytics. Textual messages in App store reviews, tweets, online discussions taking place in mailing lists and user forums, are analysed by combining natural language processing techniques to filter out irrelevant data; text mining and machine learning algorithms to classify messages into different categories, such as bug report and feature request. Our research objective is to exploit a linguistic technique based on speech-acts for the analysis of online discussions with the ultimate goal of discovering requirement-relevant information. In this paper, we present a revised and extended version of the speech-acts based analysis technique, which we previously presented at CAiSE 2017, together with a detailed experimental characterisation of its properties. Datasets used in the experimental evaluation are taken from a widely used open source software project (161120 textual comments), as well as from an industrial project in the home energy management domain. We make them available for experiment replication purposes. On these datasets, our approach is able to successfully classify messages into Feature/Enhancement and Other, with F-measure of 0.81 and 0.84 respectively. We also found evidence that there is an association between types of speech-acts and categories of issues, and that there is correlation between some of the speech-acts and issue priority, thus motivating further research on the exploitation of our speech-acts based analysis technique in semi-automated multi-criteria requirements prioritisation
CrowdIntent: Annotation of Intentions Hidden in Online Discussions
No full textStakeholders working in open-source software development
use social media, emails or any available means in
the Internet to communicate and express what they want or
need through the use of text. The recognition of such needs or
desires (that we call intentions) is usually done by a human
reader, and it can require a considerable effort when the amount
of messages in online discussions increases. The problem is
that to support an automated recognition of the intentions
hidden in the text, data are needed in the domain of software
development for training classifiers. However, so far there is no
data annotated with intentions that can be used for data mining
purposes. In order to tackle the lack of data we have collected
online discussions in the domain of software development and
asked people to annotate such discussions with intentions. This
collection has been performed by crowdsourcing the task of
annotating sentences with their hidden intention. In this paper
we report the experience of carrying out a crowdsourcing project
with a heterogeneous crowd. We discuss how we applied the steps
of the crowdsourcing workflow in CrowdIntent. Lessons learned
and future work are also presented
Discovering Speech Acts in Online Discussions: A Tool-supported method
No full textAbstract. The increasing participation of users of software applications in on-line discussions is attracting the attention of researchers in requirements elicita-tion to look at this channel of communication as potential source of requirements knowledge. Taking the perspective of software engineers who analyse online dis-cussions, the task of identifying bugs and new features by reading huge threads of e-mails can become effort demanding and error prone. Recognising discussants’ speech acts in an automated manner is important to reveal intentions, such as suggesting, complaining, which can provide indicators for bug isolation and re-quirements. This paper presents a tool-supported method for identifying speech acts, which may provide hints to software engineers to speed up the analysis of online discussions. It builds on speech act theory and on an adaptation of the GATE framework, which implements computational linguistic techniques
Analysing User Feedback and Finding Experts: Can Goal-Orientation Help?
No full textGoal-oriented approaches in requirements engineering aim at understanding stakeholders’ needs, modelling the intentions, dependencies and expectation to be met by a system-to-be, or by a new release of an existing system in a software evolution process. In the context of software evolution, we consider user feedback, as commonly available in user forums and bug-trackers, as the information artefact that impacts specific requirements and design of the software. In this position paper, we argue about the advantages that goal-orientation can bring in this context when addressing the following issues: i) the analysis of user feedback, usually expressed as free or semi-structured text; and ii) the identification of the most expert users that can contribute to requirements evolution. We define the problems, state the emerging research questions and present contributions with the help of an illustrative example
Revealing the Obvious? A Retrospective Artefact Analysis for an Ambient Assisted-Living Project
No full textA variety of methods and techniques for requirements elicitation and analysis have been proposed, in response to the diverse needs posed by the different types of information that have to be managed in designing complex software systems. Experience from real projects gives evidence that often these techniques are combined within a project, but which requirements each technique can better contribute to specify, and which information sources are prevalently used during requirements elicitation and validation is poorly documented.
In this paper, we describe a retrospective analysis of the requirements engineering process of a project in the domain of ambient assisted living, where several techniques were used to elicit the requirements of a socio-technical system. By empirically analysing the available project documentation, we collect evidences of the type of information that various elicitation techniques can give in a real project, linking initial sources of information to final requirements through different analysis paths.
We illustrate the design of this study and present an analysis of the collected data
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