Mining Incoherent Requirements in Technical Specifications

Requirements are designed to specify the features of systems. Even for a simple system, several thousands of requirements produced by different authors are often needed. It is then frequent to observe overlap and incoherence problems. In this paper, we propose a method to construct a corpus of various types of incoherences and a categorization that leads to the definition of patterns to mine incoherent requirements. We focus in this contribution on incoherences (1) which can be detected solely from linguistic factors and (2) which concern pairs of requirements. These represent about 60% of the different types of incoherences; the other types require extensive domain knowledge and reasoning