A Requirements Elicitation Approach Based in Templates and Patterns

Abstract

One of the main problems of requirements elicitation is expressing customer requirements in a form that can be understood not only by requirements engineers but also by noncomputer professional customers and users. The usual choice for expressing elicited requirements is natural language, since it is frequently the only common language to all participants. Problems of natural language are well–known, but using more formal notations too early is a risky choice that can make requirements impossible to understand for customers and users. Moreover, requirements engineers do not usually have good writing skills, and sometimes semantically correct requirements, expressed in natural language, are not understood because of the way they are written. in this paper, we present requirements templates that can improve requirements elicitation and expression, and two kinds of patterns: linguistic patterns, which are very used sentences in natural language requirements descriptions that can be parameterized and integrated into templates, and requirements patterns, which are generic requirements templates that are found very often during the requirements elicitation process and that can be reused with some adaptation.