Requirements change requests classification: An ontology-based approach

Abstract

Requirements for software system projects are becoming increasingly exposed to a large number of change requests. Change requests captured in natural language are difficult to analyze and evaluate. This may lead to major problems, such as requirements creep and ambiguity. To provide an appropriate understanding of a change request in a systematic way, this paper aims to develop an ontology for classifying change requests as either functional changes (FC) or technical changes (TC). Technical changes are further classified into nine categories including the ISO 25010 quality characteristics and Project requirement and constraints. To establish a comprehensive representation of change requests, we collected users’ reviews from PROMISE repository and classified them using the protégé editor. The feasibility of the proposed approach is illustrated through examples taken from PROMISE repository.