Including Functional and Non-Technical Requirements in a Software Requirement Patterns catalogue

 

Reutilization has been empirically proved as a source of advantages in many fields of Software
Engineering, particularly in software design (design patterns) and in the implementation (code
reutilization). In the GESSI research group we are currently participating in a research for
promoting the use of patterns in the Requirements Engineering (RE) stage. Our idea is to use
Software Requirement Pattern (SRP) as an artefact for allowing reutilization in the RE stage.
The concept of requirement pattern has already been presented to the scientific community with
a good reception. Until now we have done the following contributions:
• A proposal of metamodel that states how should be a catalogue Software Requirement
Patterns (SRP).
• A first set of 29 non-functional SRPs that follow the metamodel, obtained from: 6
Software Requirement Specification (SRS) documents; experts knowledge support; and
literature review.
• The method PABRE (PAtterns-Based Requirements Elicitation) for the application of
the catalogue during the elicitation of requirements.
• The first version of the PABRE system, composed by two software tools for managing
the catalogue and for using it in the elicitation, documentation and call-for-tenders
process.
In this research we are collaborating with the SSI-CRPHT that has provided us knowledge and
material from real projects that has been used as the basis for this research. Specifically they
have given us access to the 6 SRS documents, and in the experts support assessment.
Requirements can be particular of a software domain or general-purpose, i.e. applicable in any
domain. Non-technical requirements, as it happens with non-functional requirements, are
general-purpose in most of the cases. On the contrary, functional requirements are usually
particular of the domain that they are constraining. The aim of this project is to build of a
catalogue of SRPs for the specification of non-technical requirements and functional
requirements of a domain, specifically the domain of human resources management systems.
The project will be composed of:
• Study the state of the art of the reuse in the RE stage, particularly on the use of patterns
to achieve the reuse of knowledge.
• Definition of a supporting metamodel.
• Construction of a set of non-technical SRPs from the 6 SRS documents already
analysed in the past research.
• Study of the Human-resources management domain and construction of a set of
functional SRPs from new SRSs documents.