Improving Requirement Boilerplates Using Sequential Pattern Mining

Abstract

Abstract. In the field of requirements engineering, the use of the so-called boilerplates (i.e. standard phrases and sentences containing gaps to be filled in) is a popular solution to reduce variation among requirements and writers, and thus to improve the clarity of technical specifications. However, the examples of boilerplates found in the literature are often very general, as they need to be applicable to projects as varied as computer software and aircraft or industrial machines. As a result, they only partially fulfill their role, leaving a lot of freedom to the writers in charge of filling in the gaps. Instead, we would like to propose a bottom-up approach for discovering more specific sequences that could constitute either boilerplates or elements to instantiate these boilerplates. To this end, we investigate whether sequential data mining techniques can be used on a small corpus of genuine requirements written in French at CNES (Centre National d'Études Spatiales), the French Space Agency.

Towards an ergonomic linguistics: Application to the design of controlled natural languages

“…Each user was given a definition of what a specification is and was asked to rate the structures from 5 to 1 based on their assessment of the relevance of the structure, for more details see (Warnier & Condamines, 2017a). Eighty‐seven people answered the questionnaire: 48 respondents, accustomed to reading specifications, were from CNES, and 39 were non‐experts (ordinary speakers) (Warnier & Condamines, 2017b).…”

Pour le développement d’une linguistique ergonomique : l’exemple des langues contrôlées

“…La longueur moyenne des candidats-phrasèmes est de 2,8. Pour le détail de ces différentes étapes, consulter Warnier & Condamines (2017b). L'étape suivante consiste à travailler cette liste pour sélectionner les structures qui semblent les plus pertinentes puis à proposer (sur la base de ce que nous savons du fonctionnement de la langue) des structures alternatives, pour les tester auprès de locuteurs non-experts vs experts de la rédaction et de la lecture de spécification, afin d'évaluer lesquelles semblent susceptibles d'être retenues dans des recommandations.…”