The OpenReq prototype

The OpenReq prototype

The prototype offers new solutions not available in other, industrial tools.

The OpenReq prototype (codename: InnoSensr, for more see OpenReq Live) is already used for managing requirements in the OpenReq project. Furhermore, it has been demonstrated to software companies in Austria. They have evaluated it as a very innovative technology that supports SME in easily defining and managing requirements. In addition, the prototype is used as a central component in a university course on requirements engineering at the Graz University of Technology.

New solutions

Interestingly, the OpenReq online prototype offers new solutions not available in other, industrial tools. It includes, for instance, a Twitter analysis which helps to estimate the popularity of a requirement in specific Twitter communities. It also contains intelligent mechanisms for identifying project stakeholders.

More specifically, in collaboration with Siemens, the OpenReq project has developed technologies to semi-automatically assign stakeholders to requirements that the company should manage. Otherwise the assignment of stakeholders to requirements would be a manual process – tedious especially in projects with a couple of thousands of requirement.

In addition, the OpenReq prototype includes services that do not only allow to determine release plans but also reconfigurations for existing release plans. Such reconfiguration may be needed when situations change.  Examples of such situational changes are new stakeholders in a project and changes in the resources. Furthermore, in collaboration with the University of Helsinki, TU Graz is developing model-based diagnosis and repair methods that allow the reconfiguration of release plans in an efficient fashion.

Integration into the Bugzilla Eclipse community platform

Basic OpenReq technologies have already been integrated into the Bugzilla Eclipse community platform. In this case, group-based multi-attribute utility theory helps to prioritise requirements in an OpenSource community in an unobtrusive fashion. In such scenarios, developers are associated with different companies and, therefore, different approaches are needed to support prioritisation.

What is noteworthy is that the detailed prioritisation approach is documented in a paper that has been accepted for publication in the Requirements Engineering 2018 conference:

A. Felfernig, M. Stettinger, M. Atas, R. Samer, J. Nerlich, S. Scholz, J. Tiihonen, and M. Raatikainen. Towards Utility-based Prioritization of Requirements in Open Source Environments, 26th IEEE Conference on Requirements Engineering, to appear, Banff, Canada, 2018.

Are you looking for more information?

To conclude, further details on OpenReq group decision support, recommendation, configuration, and diagnosis approaches are also documented in the book on group recommender systems written by members of the TU Graz team:

A. Felfernig, L. Boratto, M. Stettinger, and M. Tkalcic. Group Recommender Systems, Springer, 2018.