Advances in the state of the art have been achieved by the partners working in the four main research areas of the project:
In software requirements intelligence, we envision services that automatically collect, process, and analyse user feedback from diverse public channels to provide stakeholders actionable insights into how users perceive their product, what problems their users face, and the requests they have.
To create and maintain a healthy set of requirements (as well as a productive and fulfilling workflow), we are creating tools to support stakeholders. These tools include suggestions on how to improve the quality of their requirements based on linguistic patterns, as well as suggestions that consider the needs and capabilities of individual stakeholders within the project.
Group decision support algorithms are developed within OpenReq to help decide which opinion matters the most for a given context and what decision needs to be made by who. These algorithms consider factors such as experience, recommendations from other stakeholders, and many more.
Understanding how requirements are interrelated makes change management much easier to handle, leading to less errors introduced during the process. We envision services that allow to visualise and identify requirements dependencies, which will help stakeholders in processes like release planning (i.e. knowing which requirements depend on each other).
The services developed in OpenReq are designed as microservices. This decision as internal and external benefits. One internal benefit is each partner and team can work on technologies and programming languages they are the expert in. Another benefit is that maintaining and extending single services will be easier as they only contain source code designed to carry out one particular task (which is in contrast to monoliths that contain the source code for a full system). One external benefit is that interested parties can either use single services offered by OpenReq or use one of the tools we will develop, which bundle a set of microservices. Generally, we avoid tight dependencies between services, which further foster re-using and extending our results.
Deploying and integrating microservices can be a hurdle for some users. In such cases, we also offer a completely packaged product, OpenReq Live. This web-based tool brings together features from each of the four main high-level components mentioned above and provides an end-to-end requirements management experience. Finally, OpenReq sensible functionalities are integrated into existing development tools, such as Jira, Bugzilla, and Eclipse as well as Requirements Management tools, such as IBM Rational DOORS.
We expect OpenReq to have a positive impact on the overall Requirements Engineering process, with economic and societal repercussions. Its use will result in requirements of higher quality, containing less faults, and enabling an easier and controlled evolution of software-enabled products and services. By using OpenReq, we estimate significant reductions in RE activities costs and, therefore, in total software project costs.
