An Ontology-Based Approach to the Agile Requirements Engineering

The paper presents an approach to the agile requirements engineering based on the OWL ontologies. A brief overview of the benefits of an ontology-based approach to requirements engineering is given. Attention is focused on agile engineering requirements process. The proposed approach uses three ontologies. The first ontology is used to represent knowledge about the agile requirements engineering process. The second ontology is designed to match natural language sentences with the requirements in order to identify conflicts. The third ontology is used to accumulate the knowledge about the domain of the software product. The first ontology is core. This ontology consists of classes corresponding to events, roles and artefacts of agile development. Object properties established between the individuals of class can be used to identify directly or indirectly linked requirements and requirements artefacts. This enables maintaining requirements traceability. Also the ontology takes into account particular qualities of working with the requirements in agile development processes including knowledge about the criteria for assessing the quality of user stories that is the most common form to record the requirements in agile methods. The ontologies are implemented in the Protege environment.