Building the Structure of Specification Documents from Utterances of Requirements Elicitation Meetings

In the process of requirements elicitation in software development, it is usual that participants with different roles have the series of meetings and requirements analysts compose specification documents between the meetings. There are many studies for supporting these processes, such as cooperative working models in meetings, tools based on those models, and specification & design methods such as Structured Analysis and Object-Oriented Analysis. However there are no studies how to describe specification documents based on contents of meetings. Participants communicate verbally with each other, so we consider that the effective method should be based on verbal histories, i.e. utterances appearing in meetings. We propose a method to write specification documents considering that structures of meetings is reflected into structures of specification documents. Briefly speaking, the assumed basis of our method is that analysts put pairs of subsequently discussed topics (we call them “temporally adjacent topics”) into close positions in the tree structures of the specification documents. In this paper, we also assess the feasibility and the effectiveness of the method through several experiments and case studies.