An Approach for Providing Recommendation for Requirements Non-Conformant with Requirement Templates (RTs)

Shivani Balwani, Saurabh Tiwari, Sourish Dasgupta, Akhilesh Sharma

Abstract: RTs generally possess a fixed syntactic structure and comprise pre-defined slots, and requirements written in the format of RTs must conform with the template structure. Suppose the requirements do not conform to the RT. In that case, manually verifying the conformity of requirements to RTs becomes a tedious task due to the large size of industry requirement documents and introduces the possibility of errors. Furthermore, rewriting requirements to conform to the template structure when they initially do not conform presents a significant challenge. This paper proposes a tool-based approach that automatically verifies whether Functional Requirements (FRs) conform to RTs. It recommends a Template Conformance (TC) requirement by generating a semantically identical requirement that Conforms to the template structure. Our study focused on two well-known RTs, Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS) and RUPPs, for checking conformance and making recommendations. We utilized Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and applied our approach to industrial and publicly available case studies. Our results demonstrate that the proposed tool-based approach facilitates requirement analysis and aids in recommending requirements based on their conformity with RTs. Our results show an accuracy of 83.9% for providing recommendations to non-conformant requirements with RTs.