Abstract Requirements specification is a core activity in the requirements engineering phase of a software development project. Researchers have contributed extensively to the field of requirements specification, but the extent to which their proposals have been adopted in practice remains unclear. We gathered evidence about the state of practice in requirements specification by focussing on the artefacts used in this activity, the application of templates or guidelines, how requirements are structured in the specification document, what tools practitioners use to specify requirements, and what challenges they face. We conducted an interview-based survey study involving 24 practitioners from 12 different Swedish IT companies. We recorded the interviews and analysed these recordings, primarily by using qualitative methods. Natural language constitutes the main specification artefact but is usually accompanied by some other type of instrument. Most requirements specifications use templates or guidelines, although they seldom follow any fixed standard. Requirements are always structured in the document according to the main functionalities of the system or to project areas or system parts. Different types of tools, including MS Office tools, are used, either individually or combined, in the compilation of requirements specifications. We also note that challenges related to the use of natural language (dealing with ambiguity, inconsistency, and incompleteness) are the most frequent challenges that practitioners face in the compilation of requirements specifications. These findings are contextualized in terms of demographic factors related to the individual interviewees, the organization they are affiliated with, and the project they selected to discuss during our interviews. A number of our findings have been previously reported in related studies. These findings show that, in spite of the large number of notations, models and tools proposed from academia for improving requirements specification, practitioners still mainly rely on plain natural language and general-purpose tool support. We expect more empirical studies in this area in order to better understand the reason of this low adoption of research results.

Context: Incomplete or incorrect detection of requirement dependencies has proven to result in reduced release quality and substantial rework. Additionally, the extraction of dependencies is challenging since requirements are mostly documented in natural language, which makes it a cognitively difficult task. Moreover, with ever-changing and new requirements, a manual analysis process must be repeated, which imposes extra hardship even for domain experts. Objective: The three main objectives of this research are: 1) Proposing a new dependency extraction method using a variant of Active Learning (AL). 2) Evaluating this AL and Ontology-based Retrieval (OBR) as baseline methods for dependency extraction on the two industrial data sets. 3) Analyzing the value gained from integrating these diverse approaches to form two hybrid methods. Method: Building on the general AL, ensemble and semi-supervised machine learning, a variant of AL was developed, which was further integrated with OBR to form two hybrid methods (Hybrid1, Hybrid2) for extracting three types of dependencies (requires, refines, other): Hybrid1 used OBR as a substitute for human expert; Hybrid2 used dependencies extracted through the OBR as an additional input for training set in AL. Results: For two industrial case studies, AL extracted more dependencies than OBR. Hybrid1 showed improvement for both data sets. For one of them, F1 score increased to 82.6% compared to the AL baseline score of 49.9%. Hybrid2 increased the accuracy by 25% to the level of 75.8% compared to the AL baseline accuracy. OBR also complemented the AL approach by reducing 50% of the human effort.

Background: Requirement engineering is often considered a critical activity in system development projects. The increasing complexity of software as well as number and heterogeneity of stakeholders motivate the development of methods and tools for improving large-scale requirement engineering. Aims: The empirical study presented in this paper aim to identify and understand the characteristics and challenges of a platform, as desired by experts, to support requirement engineering for individual stakeholders, based on the current pain-points of their organizations when dealing with a large number requirements. Method: We conducted a multiple case study with three companies in different domains. We collected data through ten semi-structured interviews with experts from these companies. Results: The main pain-point for stakeholders is handling the vast amount of data from different sources. The foreseen platform should leverage such data to manage changes in requirements according to customers' and users' preferences. It should also offer stakeholders an estimation of how long a requirements engineering task will take to complete, along with an easier requirements dependency identification and requirements reuse strategy. Conclusions: The findings provide empirical evidence about how practitioners wish to improve their requirement engineering processes and tools. The insights are a starting point for in-depth investigations into the problems and solutions presented. Practitioners can use the results to improve existing or design new practices and tools.

Software requirement patterns have been proposed as a type of artifact for fostering requirements reuse. In this paper, we present PABRE-Proj a tool aimed at supporting requirements elicitation and specification.

Software requirement patterns have been proposed as an artifact for fostering requirements reuse. In this paper we present PABRE-Man, a software subsystem aimed at managing a catalogue of patterns ready to be applied in requirements engineering projects.