Linguistic Patterns and Linguistic Styles for Requirements Specification: Focus on Data Entities

Abstract

Requirements specification includes technical concerns of an information system and is used throughout its life cycle. It allows for sharing the vision of the system among stakeholders and facilitates its development and operation processes. Natural languages are the most common form of requirements representation, however, they also exhibit characteristics that often introduce quality problems, such as inconsistency, incompleteness, and ambiguousness. This paper adopts the notions of linguistic pattern and linguistic style and discusses their relevance to produce better technical documentation. It focuses on the textual specification of data entities, which are elements commonly referred to throughout different types of requirements, like use cases, user stories, or functional requirements. This paper discusses how to textually represent the following elements: data entity, attribute, data type, data entity constraint, attribute constraint, and even cluster of data entities. This paper shows concrete examples and supports the discussion with three linguistic styles, represented by a rigorous requirements specification language and two informal controlled natural languages, one with a more compact and another with a more verbose, expressive, and complete representation. We analyzed how other languages cope with the representation of these data entity elements and complemented that analysis and comparison based on the PENS classification scheme. We conducted a pilot evaluation session with nineteen professional subjects who participated and provided encouraging feedback, with positive scores in all the analyzed dimensions. From this feedback, we preliminarily conclude that the adoption of these linguistic patterns would help to produce better requirements specifications written more systematically and consistently.

Automated Conditional Statements Checking for Complete Natural Language Requirements Specification

“…This makes it more difficult and inconvenient to apply these approaches, and leads to the result that most software requirements specifications are still written in natural language in practice. The investigation of Luisa et al [9] has shown that 95% of software requirements in industry are described in natural language or controlled natural language [10,11]. In this case, it is of great significance for the methods which can assist requirements analysts to identify the defects in the natural language requirements.…”

Linguistic Patterns, Styles, and Guidelines for Writing Requirements Specifications: Focus on Use Cases and Scenarios

“…Despite the diversity of terms found in the literature -for instance, "syntactic requirements pattern" [1] or "requirements template" [20] -, we assume in this paper the terms "linguistic pattern" and "linguistic style", as discussed by Silva [21], to mean, respectively, the definition and the representation of such grammatical rules. In his paper, Silva focused on business-level constructs, namely on constructs like glossary terms, stakeholders, business goals, processes, events, and flows [21], and recently on data entities [22]. Although inspired by that work, this paper is substantially different because it is focused on the textual specification of use cases and use case scenarios, and discusses not only patterns and writing styles but also gathers and discusses the respective pragmatics, i.e., practical recommendations and guidelines for writing use cases and scenarios (some of them previously discussed by other authors).…”

“…Besides, and on the contrary of other proposals, this paper supports the discussion with a unique and rich running example that includes common and pedagogical situations. This example refers to the requirements of a fictitious information system called "BillingSystem", which is an invoice management system, inspired and adapted from the example initially introduced by Silva [21], [22].…”

“…Section 3 introduces the core notions adopted in the scope of this research, i.e., the notions of linguistic pattern and linguistic style. Sections 2 and 3 are similar to those of the paper [22], however, they are included in this paper for self-completeness for those readers that did not read that previous paper. Section 4 discusses the proposed use cases' linguistic patterns and supports the debate with a running example.…”

Reliable Requirements Engineering Practices for COVID-19 Using Blockchain

“…Few papers discussed factors in the requirement negotiation process. Some papers show the gaps in the requirement negotiation process, and some papers help to find the improvements in the requirement negotiation process [81]. A list of factors of requirement negotiation is identified that need further improvement.…”