Natural language requirements boilerplates: an integrative literature review

Abstract

In the field of Requirements Engineering, natural language is the most widely used form of documenting systems requirements, mainly for its expressiveness power, freedom of words, and easiness of use. On the other hand, written requirements are frequently ambiguous, incomplete, and incorrect, among other defects, impacting into the system lifecycle. To mitigate this issue, researchers have, since 1998, developed dozens of sets of boilerplates, aiding to guide natural language requirements composition. In this integrative literature review, authors searched for these sets in traditional academic databases, grey literature, and professional media, leading to a list of 54 relevant documents. Analysis of these primary works revealed that, even when boilerplate creators wish their artifacts to be used on all kinds of systems, they are generally cataloged under the Computer Science umbrella. It turned out to be evident that ambiguity is the main issue of quality of requirements addressed by boilerplates, followed by completeness and consistency. Authors mapped the requirements boilerplates definition modes, concluding that plain sentences are the foremost choice to describe these creations. It is claimed that systematization on the construction and evaluation of requirements boilerplates is still a problem to render these activities repeatable and reproducible, as the largest part of documents does not report it. Finally, the reported evaluation methods were hierarchically clustered, leading to three typical approaches for this activity.