Assisting Requirements Recovery from Legacy Documents

Business change is often accompanied by loss of continuity of experience. This has serious implications for the adaptation of an organisation’s software since people with detailed knowledge of either the software or business processes may be unavailable to inform its adaptation. In many cases organisational memory will persist principally in the form of documents such as requirements specifications, operating procedures and regulatory standards. These offer an important resource for informing what features of the software are redundant, need to be retained or can be reused. Exploiting this resource poses formidable problems, however, since it is often incomplete, poorly structured, poorly maintained and voluminous. This paper proposes that tools exploiting probabilistic natural language-processing techniques offer the potential to ease these problems. Such tools are available, mature and have been proven in other domains.