Semantically-enriched software requirements specification

Abstract

The software requirements specification is one of the major phases in the software development cycle. This is due to the fact that different stakeholders who are involved in the development process may lack a common set of goals driving the software development or even lack a common terminology to express the requirements and goals. Therefore, the requirements specification statements and associated use-case descriptions must be formulated as clearly and with as little ambiguity as possible. In this thesis, we propose to take advantage of templates, consisting of attributes and predefined terms, to control the form of requirements statements. We also present a requirements specification software tool assisting developers in creating semi-formal use-case description statements using templates. The tool was developed as a plug-in to Eclipse, a popular software development environment. The created requirements sentences are more structurally uniform and due to the used ontology, easier to understand to stakeholders.