Keynotes

Keynote Title: Analyzing Natural-Language Requirements: The not-too-sexy and yet curiously difficult research that industry needs

While often complemented by models at various degrees of formality and detail, natural-language requirements remain pervasive across all industry sectors. Decades of research on formal methods and model-based development have not made a noticeable dent in this practice, and I do not expect the situation to change in the foreseeable future. The prevalence of natural-language requirements is largely due to the flexibility and understandability of natural language, especially when stakeholders with diverse backgrounds are involved. External factors, such as laws and regulations, further contribute to the popularity of natural language in requirements specifications.
Despite inherent challenges and drawbacks associated with natural language, it is imperative to provide scalable support for requirements analysts to be able to handle hundreds and sometimes thousands of natural-language statements. A first question here is to understand what type of support the analysts need. This varies across domains or even specific contexts. The examples I will present include checking in a practical manner the conformance of requirements with pre-defined sentence templates, extracting glossary terms and domain models from requirements, analyzing the impact of requirements changes, and deriving system test cases from requirements. I will report on results obtained from research projects in collaboration with industry, and reflect on our experience at the Software Verification and Validation group, SnT Centre, University of Luxembourg.
Providing scalable support for handling natural-language requirements entails, to various degrees, the use of natural-language processing, as well as constraint solving, information retrieval and machine learning. Such research endeavours are therefore fundamentally multidisciplinary. Unfortunately, and probably in part because of such multidisciplinarity, academic research on the management and analysis of natural-language requirements is limited and comparatively dwarfed by the more formal approaches to requirements engineering.

Biography

Lionel C. Briand is professor and FNR PEARL chair in software verification and validation at the SnT centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust, University of Luxembourg. He also acts as vice-director of the centre. Lionel started his career as a software engineer in France (CS Communications & Systems) and has conducted applied research in collaboration with industry for more than 20 years.
Until moving to Luxembourg in January 2012, he was heading the Certus center for software verification and validation at Simula Research Laboratory, where he was leading applied research projects in collaboration with industrial partners. Before that, he was on the faculty of the department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, where he was full professor and held the Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Software Quality Engineering. He has also been the software quality engineering department head at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Germany, and worked as a research scientist for the Software Engineering Laboratory, a consortium of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CSC, and the University of Maryland, USA.
Lionel was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow for his work on the testing of object-oriented systems. He was recently granted the IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills award and the IEEE Reliability Society engineer-of-the-year award for his work on model-based verification and testing. In 2016, he was also the recipient of an ERC Advanced grant from the European Commission. His research interests include: software testing and verification, model-driven software development, search-based software engineering, and empirical software engineering.
Lionel has been on the program, steering, or organization committees of many international, IEEE and ACM conferences. He is the coeditor-in-chief of Empirical Software Engineering (Springer) and is a member of the editorial boards of Systems and Software Modeling (Springer) and Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability (Wiley). More details can be found on: http://people.svv.lu/briand/.

The Presentation slides can be downloaded.