Commercialisation of an Application for Requirements Engineering (DRONA)

A digital assistant that provides semi-automated support for the definition of system requirements, their verification and the generation of documents.

The project at a glance

Start date:

01 Nov 2017
Duration in months:

36
Funding:

FNR JUMP
Principal Investigator(s):

Lionel Briand (external)

About

A joint project of SnT, Clearstream, and escent, DRONA focuses on developing a new tool for requirements engineering of IT projects in the financial industry, aiming to slash error rates and cut production costs, all the while boosting service quality.

Ordinarily, business analysts elicit and specify requirements that stipulate what stakeholders wish to change, users’ needs, and what the capabilities of the system need to be. However, no matter how experienced the analysts are, human error is inevitable. All too often, the outcome can be sub-optimal, resulting in disappointment and frustration. DRONA aims to make requirements analysis more efficient and effective by providing analysts with semi-automated assistance for requirements engineering tasks, such as elicitation and specification.

In particular, the project focuses on building a tool to verify that IT requirements are written correctly and based on solid foundations – as well as being internally coherent and correct. In that sense, the team recognised how AI techniques could address this challenge and improve the efficiency of the IT projects and their time-to-market.

DRONA is a digital assistant that guides and semi-automates critical IT analysis activities. More definitively, it provides semi-automated support for the definition of system requirements, their verification, and the generation of documents. It also provides acceptance criteria to ensure that a system is accepted by its users or customers. Relying on AI, as well as on automated validation and verification assistance, DRONA ensures the consistency and completeness of requirements to a significant degree. It also ensures that the right functionality is being developed and properly validated to achieve a successful deployment.

With this successful proof of concept, DRONA could fill a gap in the market of the financial domain, where thoroughly executed IT projects play a critical role.