Advances in automated support for requirements engineering: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Requirements Engineering (RE) has undergone several transitions over the years, from traditional methods to agile approaches emphasising increased automation. In many software development projects, requirements are expressed in natural language and embedded within large volumes of text documents. At the same time, RE activities aim to define software systems' functionalities and constraints. However, manually executing these tasks is time-consuming and prone to errors. Numerous research efforts have proposed tools and technologies for automating RE activities to address this challenge, which are documented in published works. This review aims to examine empirical evidence on automated RE and analyse its impact on the RE sub-domain and software development. To achieve our goal, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) following established guidelines for conducting SLRs. We aimed to identify, aggregate, and analyse papers on automated RE published between 1996 and 2022. We outlined the output of the support tool, the RE phase covered, levels of automation, development approach, and evaluation approaches. We identified 85 papers that discussed automated RE from various perspectives and methodologies. The results of this review demonstrate the significance of automated RE for the software development community, which has the potential to shorten development cycles and reduce associated costs. The support tools primarily assist in generating UML models (44.7%) and other activities such as omission of steps, consistency checking, and requirement validation. The analysis phase of RE is the most widely automated phase, with 49.53% of automated tools developed for this purpose. Natural language processing technologies, particularly POS tagging and Parser, are widely employed in developing these support tools. Controlled experimental methods are the most frequently used (48.2%) for evaluating automated RE tools, while user studies are the least employed evaluation method (8.2%). This paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by providing an updated overview of the research literature, enabling a better understanding of trends and state-of-the-art practices in automated RE for researchers and practitioners. It also paves the way for future research directions in automated requirements engineering.