MAANA: An Automated Tool for DoMAin-Specific HANdling of Ambiguity
Saad Ezzini, Sallam Abualhaija, Chetan Arora, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Lionel Briand · 2021
MAANA (in Arabic: "meaning") is a tool for performing domain-specific handling of ambiguity in requirements. Given a requirements document as input, MAANA detects the requirements that are potentially ambiguous. The focus ofMAANA is on coordination ambiguity and prepositional-phrase attachment ambiguity; these are two common ambiguity types that have been studied in the requirements engineering literature. To detect ambiguity, MAANA utilizes structural patterns and a set of heuristics derived from a domain-specific corpus. The generated analysis file after running the tool can be reviewed by requirements analysts. Through combining different knowledge sources, MAANA highlights also the requirements that might contain unacknowledged ambiguity. That is when the analysts understand different interpretations for the same requirement, without explicitly discussing it with the other analysts due to time constraints. This artifact paper presents the details of MAANA. MAANA is associated with the ICSE 2021 technical paper titled "Using Domain-specific Corpora for Improved Handlingof Ambiguity in Requirements". The tool is publicly available onGitHub and Zenodo.