Paper Info
Title
On systematically building a controlled natural language for functional requirements
Abstract
Natural language (NL) is pervasive in software requirements specifications (SRSs). However, despite its popularity and widespread use, NL is highly prone to quality issues such as vagueness, ambiguity, and incompleteness. Controlled natural languages (CNLs) have been proposed as a way to prevent quality problems in requirements documents, while maintaining the flexibility to write and communicate requirements in an intuitive and universally understood manner. In collaboration with an industrial partner from the financial domain, we systematically develop and evaluate a CNL, named Rimay, intended at helping analysts write functional requirements. We rely on Grounded Theory for building Rimay and follow well-known guidelines for conducting and reporting industrial case study research. Our main contributions are: (1) a qualitative methodology to systematically define a CNL for functional requirements; this methodology is intended to be general for use across information-system domains, (2) a CNL grammar to represent functional requirements; this grammar is derived from our experience in the financial domain, but should be applicable, possibly with adaptations, to other information-system domains, and (3) an empirical evaluation of our CNL (Rimay) through an industrial case study. Our contributions draw on 15 representative SRSs, collectively containing 3215 NL requirements statements from the financial domain. Our evaluation shows that Rimay is expressive enough to capture, on average, 88% (405 out of 460) of the NL requirements statements in four previously unseen SRSs from the financial domain.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1007/s10664-021-09956-6
EMPIRICAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Natural language requirements, Functional requirements, Controlled natural language, Qualitative study, Case study research
Journal
26
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1382-3256
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
26
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Veizaga Alvaro100.34
Alferez Mauricio200.34
Torre Damiano300.34
Mehrdad Sabetzadeh498861.84
Lionel C. Briand58795481.98