Conditional Statements in Requirements Artifacts: Logical Interpretation, Use Cases for Automated Software Engineering, and Fine-Grained Extraction

This thesis constitutes the first work in the RE community that studies the potential of extracting conditional statements from requirements. It is intended to stimulate further engagement of researchers and practitioners in the field of conditionals in RE artifacts. In essence, we present fundamental research on the notion of conditionals in requirements as well as methods for their fine-grained extraction. We show that conditionals are prevalent in requirements and mainly occur in explicit, marked form. Further, we reveal that conditionals are a source of ambiguity, and there is not just one way to interpret them formally. This affects any automated analysis that builds upon formalized requirements (e.g., inconsistency checking) and may also influence guidelines for writing requirements. We also present our tool-supported approach CiRA, capable of detecting conditionals in NL requirements and extracting them in fine-grained form. We evaluate our approach in a case study with three industry partners, namely, Allianz Deutschland AG (insurance), Ericsson (telecommunication), and Leopold Kostal GmbH & Co. KG (automotive), and highlight that automated conditional extraction facilitates automated acceptance test creation. CiRA is available at http://www.cira.bth.se/demo/ .