Fabiano Dalpiaz

Date: 10:30-11:00, Wednesday, 10.11.2021

Location: MS Teams ICS Colloquium

Title: Towards Conversational Tools for Requirements Engineering

Abstract: Text is the prevalent notation for expressing software and systems requirements. This is not limited to traditional requirements specification documents, but also applies to more recent sources such as user stories, acceptance criteria, user reviews, tweets, etc. Unsurprising, the research community – including the Requirements Engineering Lab at UU – has proposed dozens of NLP-powered tools for analyzing these textual requirements. These tools, however, analyze artifacts that are created after-the-fact as a consolidation and summarization of the conversations that take place between analysts and stakeholders. In this talk, I lay down the elements of conversational requirements engineering, a research direction in which the emphasis is on the construction and assessment of tools that continuously support analysts while they hold a dialogue with the stakeholders, rather than after the dialogue took place. In addition to posing theoretical and technological challenges, conversational RE calls for different methods for validating NLP-powered tools