A Methodology for Software Requirements Elicitation and Analysis: Semi-automatic Assistance in Elicitation and Analysis of Textual User Requirements

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a sub-discipline within Software Engineering increasingly recognized as a critical component in the success of a software development project. With the escalating complexity of software requirements, problems of traditional requirements engineering techniques, including the use of natural language text, are becoming increasingly apparent. This research aims to assist software analysts in dealing with the challenges that exist in correctly understanding user requirements during the interactive process of requirement elicitation and analysis. It proposes a methodology related to visualization of textual requirements and ways of making them shared, reviewed and debated by the stakeholders. The approach is based on a syntactic analysis and formalization of the text written in natural language and enriched with domain-related information extracted from reusable domain-specific data models. The applicability of this research is illustrated with a case study. A prototype implementing our methodology is developed as a proof-of-concept. The results of controlled experiments designed to evaluate our approach prove the validity of the methodology.