Documenting requirements specifications using natural language requirements boilerplates

摘要

The natural language (NL) is frequently applied to document the stakeholders' statements and their needs during requirement elicitation activities. Nevertheless, the use of generic NL has potential for the issues of unclear and inconsistent requirements. These issues may result from the diverse interpretations by the stakeholders or other various sources of documents and artefacts. Additionally, the issues of ambiguity and incompleteness have contributed to the volatility problems to the elicited requirements, and lead to more complex situations, if the software has been deployed to the client site. The main objective of this paper was to discuss the definition and application of predefined boilerplates to specify the requirements in the form of NL statements. In this study, the proposed boilerplates were defined and classified based on two main types of requirements, namely functional and non-functional (performance, constraints, and specific quality). The applicability of the predefined boilerplates was demonstrated using the industrial strength of MediNET system (a healthcare application) case study. As a summary, the predefined boilerplates were found helpful, especially among novice requirement engineers to express and specify their requirements in a consistent manner and a standardized way. The motivation of this study was to facilitate a better way of documenting the elicited requirements from the stakeholders, particularly in specifying the requirements based on the predefined boilerplates, relatively to improve the quality of the NL statements.