A Semantic Wiki Approach to Enable Behaviour Driven Requirements Management

Abstract

Poorly managed requirements are considered as one of the principal causes of projects failure and consequently companies struggle to find an effective solution for requirements elicitation and further management. The adoption of such solution becomes even more difficult when the collaboration between different departments (e.g. marketing and development) is necessary. To address this challenge, the authors propose a methodology for requirements management based on Semantic Wiki and Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). BDD allows developers and end-users to interoperate and encourages seamless collaboration between all project participants. It also certifies that requirements are treated properly by their associated developments through the connection of textual descriptions to functional tests. Semantic wikis can be an added value in requirements management due to their enhanced browser interface and collaborative knowledge sharing capability. They allow stakeholders to participate in requirements management independently of their location. This is of major importance to reduce the problem of lack of inputs from interested parties. Moreover, with semantic wikis adoption, end-users and ontologies are able to coexist in one system since wiki pages are presented in a human-readable format in parallel to their formal representation in ontologies. This knowledge representation supports companies decision-making by allowing managers to prioritize implementations, to keep a trace of requirements evolution, and reuse implementations when new requirements enter the system.