Requirements Engineering through Exploratory Analysis of Usage Data

The understanding of what a system must and should be is documented in requirements, which form the basis of most engineering projects. Incremental development of production and manufacturing systems is based on the experience of engineers and customers regarding the highest potentials for improvement. In everyday development, this often comes down to the instinct of leading engineers. With an increasing complexity and automation of modern systems, while data grow, hands-on experience diminishes. The knowledge of how the system is used and where potentials for improvements arise is contained in the increasingly available usage data, as they form a record of internal processes and states. This data is gathered by modern systems, yet to many it is unclear, how to extract the relevant knowledge for product improvement from it. This paper proposes an approach to analyze usage data of production systems in order to identify and prioritize requirements through the application of exploratory data analysis. Exploratory data analysis is discussed as a tool to extract knowledge from complex systems. Methods for selecting the relevant data, identifying technically meaningful hypotheses and transferring them into applicable requirements are described.