Indikatorbasierte Erkennung und Kompensation von ungenauen und unvollständig beschriebenen Softwareanforderungen

The vision of OTF Computing is to have the software needs of end users in the future covered by an automatic composition of existing software services. Here we focus on natural language software requirements that end users formulate and submit to OTF providers as requirement specifications. These requirements serve as the sole foundation for the composition of software; but they can be inaccurate and incomplete. Up to now, software developers have identified and corrected these deficits by using a bidirectional consolidation process. However, this type of quality assurance is no longer included in OTF Computing - the classic consolidation process is dropped. This is where this work picks up, dealing with the inaccuracies of freely formulated software design requirements. To do this, we developed the CORDULA (Compensation of Requirements Descriptions Using Linguistic Analysis) system that recognizes and compensates for language deficiencies (e.g., ambiguity, vagueness and incompleteness) in requirements written by inexperienced end users. CORDULA supports the search for suitable software services that can be combined in a composition by transferring requirement specifications into canonical core functionalities. This dissertation provides the first-ever method for holistically recording and improving language deficiencies in user-generated requirement specifications by dealing with ambiguity, incompleteness and vagueness in parallel and in sequence.