Requirement analysis evolution through patterns

This paper presents a strategy, based on requirement patterns (RP), aimed at improving the requirement analysis discipline by allowing busines s analysts (BA) to produce more reliable SW requirements in a significantly shorter time, minimising the overall requirement risks. In numer ous business organisations, IT systems are increasing t heir strategic significance. In extremely competitive environments, such as investment banking -where thi s methodology has been tested- modern and advanced IT systems can enable the organisation to obtain and t o maintain a predominant position in the market, whic h in turn results in a greater ROI. Regrettably a number of academic and industrial studies depict a catastrophic picture about SW projects: most of them are likely to fail and, logically, the probability of failure grows with the size of t he project. The project failure factor varies within a range of 50% - 70%. Furthermore, such studies clearly show that requirements is the area where th e major risks reside. The proposed strategy is based on the introduction of elegant, well-proven, technolog y- agnostic, architecturally-compatible, simple and reusable patterns that, focusing on the functional requirements, expand on other requirement analysis artefacts such as domain object model (DOM), business rules (BR), user interface (UI) and glossary