A Business Process-Driven Approach for Requirements Dependency Analysis

Dependencies among software artifacts are very useful for various software development and maintenance activities such as change impact analysis and effort estimation. In the past, the focus on artifact dependencies has been at the design and code level rather than at the requirements level. This is due to the difficulties in identifying dependencies in a text-based requirements specification. We observed that difficulties reside in the disconnection among itemized requirements and the lack of a more systematic approach to write text-based requirements. Business process models are an increasingly important part of a requirements specification. In this paper, we present a mapping between workflow patterns and dependency types to aid dependency identification and change impact analysis. Our real-world case study results show that some participants, with the help of the mapping, discovered more dependencies than other participants using text-based requirements only. Though many of these additional dependencies are highly difficult to spot from the text-based requirements, they are however very useful for change impact analysis.