Automated Alignment between Elicitation Interviews and Requirements

Abstract

Software requirements are derived from a variety of elicitation techniques, many of which have a conversational nature, like interviews. However, evaluating whether those derived requirements faithfully reflect the stakeholders' needs remains a challenging manual task. In this paper, we formalize the task of aligning the transcript of an interview with a collection of requirements represented as user stories. We propose two heuristic metrics for alignment, called (i) requirements faithfulness: the proportion of stories supported by the transcript, and (ii) interview coverage: the proportion of transcript supported by at least one story. Then, we run experiments with large language models and embedding models that assess the ability of evaluating these metrics automatically. Experiments over four datasets show that an LLM-based solution achieves 0.86 macro-F1 on manually labeled chunk-story pairs. We also show how embedding models can be used as blockers to make the approach more scalable. This work paves the way for more research on linking conversational artifacts with requirements. The formal framework and the automated matching techniques are basic components that can be used for emerging tasks such as tracing requirements to interviews and generating requirements from conversations.