Patterns and parsing techniques for requirements specification1

Abstract: Despite the similarity with other engineering disciplines, the development process of information systems still suffers from several critical problems that compromise their success, namely in terms of time, budget and quality. The main cause for this situation is the fact that the majority of IT projects do not follow a structured, standard and systematic approach like the methodologies and best practices proposed by Software Engineering. In this paper, we describe a series of steps involved in the proposal of a new controlled natural language for requirements specification, called ProjectIT-RSL, based on the identification of the linguistic patterns that are most frequently used in requirements documents written in natural language. Requirements are then analyzed by special parsing tools, and immediately validated according with the syntactic and semantic rules of the language