RSLingo: An information extraction approach toward formal requirements specifications

Abstract

Requirements Engineering (RE) is about achieving a shared understanding about the software system to be built. No withstanding the importance of other RE activities, requirements specification deserves special attention due to its documentation purposes: to communicate requirements, someone has to write them down. In this paper we present RSLingo, a linguistic approach for improving the quality of requirements specifications, which is based on two languages and the mapping between them: RSL-PL, an extensible language for dealing with information extraction from requirements written in natural language; and RSL-IL, a formal language with a fixed set of constructs for representing and conveying RE-specific concerns. Contrarily to other approaches, this decoupling allows one to deal with requirements as “white-box” items, enabling a deeper understanding at a semantic level. Thus, RSLingo enables the automation of some verification tasks that prevent common requirements quality problems and lays the foundation to better integrate RE with the Model-Driven Engineering paradigm through transformations of requirements representations into design models.