Functional Requirements Identification Using Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering

Abstract

One of the most difficult tasks in the development of software is the identification of the functional requirements. A well-defined functional requirement will eventually map the success of a software project. A support tool that can recommend candidate functional requirements for a software project being developed will help software engineers to deliver the right software to the clients.The purpose of this study is to determine whether a collection of previously developed software applications can serve as basis for the development of a model to identify functional requirements of a project to be developed. Completed software project documentations of Master in Information Technology graduates from Higher Education Institutions in northern Luzon were collected and categorized, and projects on Faculty Evaluation Systems were analyzed in order to extract the vectors of functional requirements for the target software domain. Item-to-item collaborative filtering is then applied to these vectors to form the recommender model. Finally, the model was validated using the leave-one-out cross-validation technique. The resulting high accuracy rate indicates that the model built using the item-to-item collaborative filter may be used to build a tool that can automatically recommend important related functional requirements given one or more requirements identified by any of the project stakeholders