Requirements reuse and patterns: a survey

Abstract

Context and motivation: Multiple proposals exist that propose the adoption of reuse practices during requirements engineering processes. Question/problem: Which is the current level of adoption of these practices in organizations? Principal ideas/results: In this paper we present the preliminary results of a survey initiated at REFSQ’13 that addresses this question. The survey first investigates requirements reuse in general, and then goes in depth asking about a specific technique, software requirement patterns (SRP), which is the backbone of our PABRE framework. Contribution: The survey results show that requirements reuse is not a widespread practice in IT projects, being the most common techniques those based on the copy and later modification by hand of requirements coming from previous projects. Regarding the use of SRP, the results seem to support our hypothesis that SRP could help to ameliorate some common problems related to requirements specifications like lack of uniformity and incompleteness.