Definition and use of software requirement patterns in requirements engineering activities

Abstract

The final quality of software products and services depends on the requirements stated in the Software Requirements Specification (SRS). However, some problems like ambiguity, incompleteness and inconsistency, have been reported in the writing of SRS, especially when natural language is used. Requirements reuse has been proposed as a key asset for requirement engineers to efficiently elicit, validate and document software requirements, and as a consequence obtain SRS of better quality through more effective engineering processes. Among all the possible techniques to achieve reuse, patterns hold a prominent position. Although there have been several techniques proposed to reuse requirements, it may be observed that no concrete proposal has achieved a wide acceptance. Due to that, this research proposes the PABRE framework, which uses Software Requirement Patterns (SRP) as a means to capture and reuse requirements knowledge in the context of IT projects.