Requirements Verification in the Industry

Abstract

Requirements Engineering is a discipline that has been promoted, implemented and deployed for more than 20 years through the impulsion of standardization agencies (IEEE, ISO, ECSS,...) and national / international organizations such as AFIS, GfSE, INCOSE. Ever since, despite an increasing maturity, the Requirements Engineering discipline remains unequally understood and implemented, even within one same organization. The challenges faced today by industry include: “How to explain and make understandable the fundamentals of Requirements Engineering”, “How to be more effective in Requirements authoring”, “How to reach a Lean Requirements Engineering, in particular with improved knowledge management and the extensive use of modeling techniques”.

This paper focuses on requirements verification practices in the Industry. It gives some results of a study made end of 2010 about Requirements Engineering practices in different industrial sectors. Twenty-two companies worldwide were involved in this study through interviews and questionnaires. Current requirements verification practices are presented. It gives also some feedbacks of the use of innovative requirements authoring and verification techniques and tools in the industry. In particular, it addresses the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the lexical level for correctness verification (on the form, not on the substance) of requirements, the use of Requirements boilerplates controlled by NLP for guiding requirements writing and checking, the use of Ontologies with NLP to verify requirements consistency, and the application of Information Retrieval techniques for requirements overlapping.