The Impact of Controlled Vocabularies on Requirements Engineering Activities: A Systematic Mapping Study
Source abstract
Abstract
Context: The use of controlled vocabularies (CVs) aims to increase the quality of the specifications of the software requirements, by producing well-written documentation to reduce both ambiguities and complexity. Many studies suggest that defects introduced at the requirements engineering (RE) phase have a negative impact, significantly higher than defects in the later stages of the software development lifecycle. However, the knowledge we have about the impact of using CVs, in specific RE activities, is very scarce. Objective: To identify and classify the type of CVs, and the impact they have on the requirements engineering phase of software development. Method: A systematic mapping study, collecting empirical evidence that is published up to July 2019. Results: This work identified 2348 papers published pertinent to CVs and RE, but only 90 primary published papers were chosen as relevant. The process of data extraction revealed that 79 studies reported the use of ontologies, whereas the remaining 11 were focused on taxonomies. The activities of RE with greater empirical support were those of specification (29 studies) and elicitation (28 studies). Seventeen different impacts of the CVs on the RE activities were classified and ranked, being the two most cited: guidance and understanding (38%), and automation and tool support (22%). Conclusions: The evolution of the last 10 years in the number of published papers shows that interest in the use of CVs remains high. The research community has a broad representation, distributed across the five continents. Most of the research focuses on the application of ontologies and taxonomies, whereas the use of thesauri and folksonomies is less reported. The evidence demonstrates the usefulness of the CVs in all RE activities, especially during elicitation and specification, helping developers understand, facilitating the automation process and identifying defects, conflicts and ambiguities in the requirements. Collaboration in research between academic and industrial contexts is low and should be promoted.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline
Research context
OpenAlex topics: Software Engineering Research · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices · Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.
Affiliations
School of Computer Science & Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Department of IT and Computer Science, Pak-Austria Fachhochschule: Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology, Mang Khanpur Road, Haripur 22620, Pakistan
School of Informatics (ESEI), University of Vigo, 32004 Ourense, Spain
College of Computer Science & Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 211100, China
Funding
National Key R&D Program of China · National Natural Science Foundation of China · Joint Advanced Research Foundation of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC)
References (49)
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