Elaboration of software requirements documents by means of patterns instantiation

Abstract

Studies show that problems associated with the requirements specifications are widely recognized for affecting software quality and impacting effectiveness of its development process. The reuse of knowledge obtained from previous projects can facilitate the identification and writing of the requirements to reach the elaboration of a complete and consistent requirements document. Software patterns are a solution to capture and reuse knowledge from different contexts for the software development. On the information system domain, it is common to find a set of requirements that have similar characteristics and repeat themselves in different systems of this domain, indicating a possibility of becoming a requirements pattern. By reusing knowledge obtained in previous projects, requirements patterns can be elaborated to facilitate a more complete and consistent specification of system requirements in that domain. The advantage of using requirements patterns is to provide the software engineer a starting point for the elaboration of requirements documents, instead of starting from scratch to solve known problems. The requirements patterns can contribute to the improvement of the software quality, minimize the development time and costs, because previously defined and tested solutions are reused. This paper shows a set of functional requirements patterns and business rules elaborated to help the software engineer in the writing of the requirements document. The non-functional requirements were not considered in this project. A computational support was developed, based on that set of patterns, to facilitate the organized and complete writing of the requirements document. Case studies are presented with the use of the computational support.