Maintaining Requirements using Web Usage Data

Abstract

The use of the World Wide Web has had a huge growth and there is a greater variety of web applications with an increasing importance in society and in supporting the development to all kinds of business. Often, most of websites are providing support services that must be maintained and improved over time. This maintenance and upgrade can be difficult because frequently the requirements are no longer actual and/or often not even exist documented. Websites are increasingly monitoring usage data, and this type of information is increasingly abundant. Analyzing the usage of the websites can help identify improvements and help to maintain the website and its software requirements. This paper presents REQAnalytics, a recommender system that collects the information about the usage of a website, processes it and generates recommendations to the requirements specification of the website. This research work also presents an experimental evaluation of a case study based on an online newspaper website. The results showed that REQAnalytics can produce reports in a language closer to the business, identify most and less used finictionalities, requirements that can be split in two or more requirements and give support to the maintenance of requirements of the website being analyzed. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.