Exploiting Online Discussions in Collaborative Distributed Requirements Engineering

Large, distributed software development projects, like Open Source Software (OSS), adopt different collaborative working tools, including online forums and mailing list discussions that are valuable source of knowledge for requirements engineering tasks in software evolution, such as model revision and evolution. In our research, we aim at providing tool support for retrieving information from these online resources, and for analyzing it. The solution we propose combines natural language processing techniques, machine learning, statistical and search based techniques to address two key problems, namely the so called expert finding problem, and the problem of identifying requests for changing requirements or soliciting new requirements, by exploiting online discussions. In this paper, we describe the solution approach set up so far with the help of an OSS scenario, discuss some preliminary evaluation, and highlight future work.