Building the structure of specification documents from utterances of requirements elicitation meetings

In the process of requirements elicitation in software development, it is usual for participants with different roles to have a series of meetings and requirements analysts to compose specification documents between the meetings. There have many studies supporting these processes, such as cooperative working models in meetings, tools based on those models, and specification and design methods such as structured analyses and object-oriented analysis. However, there have been no studies describing specification documents based on contents of meetings. Participants communicate verbally with each other, so we consider that an 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 are reflected into structures of specification documents. Briefly, 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. We also assess the feasibility and the effectiveness of the method through several experiments and case studies