Abstract
Risk management is vital to a product’s lifecycle. The current practice of reducing risks relies on domain experts or management tools to identify unexpected engineering changes, where such approaches are prone to human errors and laborious operations. However, this study presents a framework to contribute to requirements management by implementing a generative probabilistic model, the supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) with collapsed Gibbs sampling (CGS), to study the topic composition within three unlabeled and unstructured industrial requirements documents. As finding the preferred number of topics remains an open-ended question, a case study estimates an appropriate number of topics to represent each requirements document based on both perplexity and coherence values. Using human evaluations and interpretable visualizations, the result demonstrates the different level of design details by varying the number of topics. Further, a relevance measurement provides the flexibility to improve the quality of topics. Designers can increase design efficiency by understanding, organizing, and analyzing high-volume requirements documents in confirmation management based on topics across different domains. With domain knowledge and purposeful interpretation of topics, designers can make informed decisions on product evolution and mitigate the risks of unexpected engineering changes.
