Towards Requirements Specification Collaboration Forum for Embedded Software Systems

Effective requirements specification for embedded software systems relies heavily on the collaboration between stakeholders to articulate accurate functional and non-functional requirements. At present, requirement engineers manually coordinate the sophisticated task of correct stakeholders selection for requirements and compilation of feedback in the embedded software domain. Because embedded software has an extensive number of stakeholders, the absence of an efficient collaboration platform causes a prolonged project completion time, elevated maintenance costs, or project failure. In this preliminary research paper, a stakeholder collaboration platform is proposed using an auto-encoder-based recommender system and SysML modeling language for embedded software systems. In the proposed framework, forums are the collaboration space for stakeholders to contribute to requirements analysis and specifications and are generated from the requirements diagram of the SysML modeling language. Owners of the requirements will be directly assigned to the forum from the SysML requirement profile information. To ensure adequate stakeholder engagement in the requirements specification process, the Collaborative Denoising Auto-Encoder (CDAE) recommender system is used for advanced auto-recommendations of requirement forums to stakeholders. This approach facilitates feedback collection and analysis to refine requirements specifications. The automatic forum creation and the advanced recommendation process of this framework will add no overhead to the requirements engineers or analysts; at the same time, a centralized collaboration platform for the stakeholders will save requirements analysis time and avoid future conflicts.