Software requirement reuse strategies are necessary to capitalize and reuse knowledge in the requirements engineering phase. The PABRE framework is designed to support requirement reuse through the use of software requirement patterns. It consists of a meta-model that describes the main concepts around the notion of pattern; a method to conduct the elicitation and documentation processes; a catalogue of patterns; and a tool that supports the catalogue's management and use. In this chapter all these elements are presented in detail making emphasis on the construction, use and evolution of software requirement patterns. Furthermore, the chapter includes the construction of a catalogue of non-technical software requirement patterns for illustration purposes. catalogue of patterns for non-technical requirements. Finally, Section 5.7 presents some conclusions and future work.
ContextThe work presented in this paper stems from the needs of the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor (TUDOR) at Luxembourg when conducting IT procurement projects over time. Since 2004, TUDOR works in collaboration with freelance and independent consultants. These consultants are federated in a business network that we refer as CASSIS. They are trained to innovative methods produced by research projects and they use these methods in industrial contexts. TUDOR monitors their activity to ensure that they do not deviate over the time. One of the main methodologies delivered to consultants is a requirement engineering method used to design Software Requirements Specification documents (SRS) for IT procurement projects in small and medium size companies [3].Consultants work in collaboration with customers to help them in identifying their needs for a new IT system supporting their business activities, and then selecting the most relevant system accordingly to their needs. In this particular context, requirements engineers' consultants define SRS for external customers and not for their internal purpose. Consultants' customers are usually looking both for an IT system and for its implementation. In other words, they have requirements towards an IT system and towards additional services. For this reason, the scope of the SRS often encompasses functional, non-functional and non-technical requirements.The initial goal of the SRS is to serve as a basis for a competitive procurement process. So their primary use is for IT sales managers to understand the needs of the customer and to propose a commercial bid. Only when this process is achieved, the SRS is used in second intend as source for the design or the customization of the selected IT system. So far, consultants and TUDOR have performed more than 40 projects in compliance with the methodology. The initial approach for capitalising requirements knowledge among the consultants was quite basic. It consisted in re-using fragments of a former SRS as a basis to build the new SRS. This approach was simple to use but required to be aware of the former projects, which was not easy for the consultants due to t...