Software Requirement Patterns

Software Requirement Patterns

Learn proven, real-world techniques for specifying software requirements with this practical reference. It details 30 requirement “patterns” offering realistic examples for situation-specific guidance for building effective software requirements. Each pattern explains what a requirement needs to convey, offers potential questions to ask, points out potential pitfalls, suggests extra requirements, and other advice. This book also provides guidance on how to write other kinds of information that belong in a requirements specification, such as assumptions, a glossary, and document history and references, and how to structure a requirements specification. A disturbing proportion of computer systems are judged to be inadequate; many are not even delivered; more are late or over budget. Studies consistently show one of the single biggest causes is poorly defined requirements: not properly defining what a system is for and what it’s supposed to do. Even a modest contribution to improving requirements offers the prospect of saving businesses part of a large sum of wasted investment. This guide emphasizes this important requirement need—determining what a software system needs to do before spending time on development. Expertly written, this book details solutions that have worked in the past, with guidance for modifying patterns to fit individual needs—giving developers the valuable advice they need for building effective software requirements

Including Functional and Non-technical Requirements in a Software Requirement Patterns Catalogue

Definition and Use of Software Requirement Patterns in Requirements Engineering

The final quality of software products and services depends on the requirements stated in the Software Requirements Specifications (SRSs). However, some problems like ambiguity, incompleteness and inconsistency have been reported in the writing of SRSs, especially when natural language is used. Requirements reuse has been proposed as a key asset for requirements engineers to efficiently elicit, validate and document software requirements and, as a consequence, obtain SRSs of better quality through more effective engineering processes. Among all the possible techniques to achieve reuse, patterns hold a prominent position. In their most classical form, patterns describe problems that occur over and over again, and then describe the core of the solution to these problems. Software engineering practitioners have adopted the notion of pattern in several contexts, remarkably related to software design (e.g., design patterns and software architectural patterns), but also in other software development phases, both earlier and later. Following this strategy, requirement patterns emerge as a natural way to reuse knowledge during the Requirements Engineering (RE) stage. Although there have been several techniques proposed to reuse requirements, it has been observed that no concrete proposal has achieved a wide acceptance, neither any covered all the necessary elements to encourage organizations to adopt requirements reuse. As a consequence, this thesis proposes the use of Software Requirement Patterns (SRPs) as a means to capture and reuse requirements knowledge in the context of information technology projects. Following the typical context-problem-solution structure of patterns, an SRP mainly consists of: a template (solution) that may generate one or more requirements when applied in a certain project, and some information (context-problem) to identify its applicability in that project. To facilitate their use, SRPs are encapsulated inside the PABRE (PAttern-Based Requirements Elicitation) framework. The framework covers all the elements that could be critical for the adoption of a requirements reuse technique. Specifically, the framework includes: - A metamodel that describes the structure and semantics of SRPs and their organization inside a catalogue. - An SRP catalogue composed by non-functional, non-technical and functional SRPs, the functional ones being specific for the content management system domain. - A method for guiding the use of an SRP catalogue during requirements elicitation and specification, as well as another one for constructing and updating it. - An economic model to perform cost-benefit analysis on the adoption of SRPs based on return-on-investment. - The PABRE system as technological support. In order to analyse the benefits and drawbacks of the SRPs proposed in this thesis, two empirical studies have been carried out to investigate the perception of participants about requirement patterns in general and SRPs in particular. The first one is an exploratory survey addressed to information technology people with industrial experience in RE, which analyses the current state of the practice of requirement patterns approaches. The second one corresponds to a set of semi-structured interviews, focussed on the SRP approach, conducted to requirements engineers of Swedish organizations. Moreover, as it has been discovered that there are few empirical studies showing the state of the practice of requirements reuse in industry, the first study also explores the current situation of requirements reuse practices in organizations.