Supporting Q&A Processes in Requirements Elicitation: Bad Smell Detection and Version Control

In the process of developing requirements specifications, a requirements analyst conducts question-and-answer (Q&A) sessions iteratively to incrementally make more complete initial requirements pre-obtained from stakeholders. However, iterated Q&A sessions often have some problems leading to a final requirements specification of lower quality. This paper presents the usage of a graph database system to identify bad smells in Q&A processes, which are symptoms leading to a lower quality product, and to control the versions of a list of requirements through the activities. In this system, the records of the Q&A activities and the requirements lists are structured and stored in a graph database Neo4j. Cypher, a database manipulation language, was used to show that we could retrieve bad smells in the Q&A process and visualize any version of the requirements list evolving through the processes.