Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Monograph

Degree

Master of Science

Program

Computer Science

Supervisor

Prof. Nazim H. Madhavji

Abstract

Abstract. Context and Motivation: Non-functional requirements (NFRs) of a system need to be classified into different types such as usability, performance, etc. This would enable stakeholders to ensure the completeness of their work by extracting specific NFRs related to their expertise. Question/Problem: Because of the size and complexity of requirement specification documents, the manual classification of NFRs is time-consuming, labour-intensive, and error-prone. We thus need an automated solution that can provide a highly accurate and efficient categorization of NFRs. Principal ideas/results: In this investigation, using natural language processing and supervised machine learning (SML) techniques, we investigate with feature extraction techniques including Part Of Speech-tagging based, Bag of Words (BoW) ,and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) combined with SML algorithms including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) SVM, Linear Regression (LR), Decision Tree (DT), Bagging DT, Extra Tree, Random Forest (RF), Gaussian Naïve Bayes (GNB), Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB), and Bernoulli Naïve Bayes (BNB). Contribution: The proposed strategy consists of three different combinations of the above-mentioned techniques. SVM with TF-IDF, LR with POS and BoW, and MNB with BoW all achieved recall values higher than 0.90, precision values above 0.87, and execution times less than 0.1s. In addition, we validated these classifiers using a case-study dataset where they promise results of recall values over 0.90 and precision values over 0.92.

Summary for Lay Audience

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) describe a set of quality attributes required for software such as performance, reliability, availability, etc. Extracting NFRs from software requirement specification (SRS) documents and classifying them into different types can provide stakeholders with specific NFR types based on their concerns. Since the functional and non-functional requirements are mixed within the same SRS, it requires a lot of human effort for distinguishing them and can be an error-prone process. In this thesis research, we studied how accurately we can automatically identify non-functional requirements from SRS documents and classify them into different types, in particular, usability, performance, security, and operational requirements. Our proposed solution can support different stakeholders such as architects to whom architecturally significant requirements e.g. performance, efficiency, and interface. are important in choosing software architectural decisions; business analysts to whom business-related NFRs e.g. security, availability, and usability are important in the business; and developers with specific expertise e.g. user interface, security, and database.

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