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PBURC: a patterns-based, unsupervised requirements clustering framework for distributed agile software development

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Abstract

Agile software development methodologies are increasingly adopted by organizations because they focus on the client’s needs, thus safeguarding business value for the final product. At the same time, as the economy and society move toward globalization, more organizations shift to distributed development of software projects. From this perspective, while adopting agile techniques seems beneficial, there are still a number of challenges that need to be addressed; among these notable is the effective cooperation between the stakeholders and the geographically distributed development team. In addition, data collection and validation for requirements engineering demands efficient processing techniques in order to handle the volume of data as well as to manage different inconsistencies, when the data are collected using online tools. In this paper, we present “PBURC,” a patterns-based, unsupervised requirements clustering framework, which makes use of machine-learning methods for requirements validation, being able to overcome data inconsistencies and effectively determine appropriate requirements clusters for optimal definition of software development sprints.

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Acknowledgments

The research presented in this paper has been carried out within the VOA3R project (Virtual Open Access Agriculture and Aquaculture Repository—http://voa3r.eu), which has received funding from the European Commission’s ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP), Theme 4—Open access to scientific information.

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Correspondence to Petros Belsis.

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Belsis, P., Koutoumanos, A. & Sgouropoulou, C. PBURC: a patterns-based, unsupervised requirements clustering framework for distributed agile software development. Requirements Eng 19, 213–225 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-013-0172-9

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