Use Case Driven Extension of ProjectIT-RSL to Support Behavioral Concerns

Requirements Engineering is a system engineering discipline of paramount importance. Its primary deliverable is the requirements specification, a document that entails the detailed description of business-specific needs to which the target software system must comply to. Despite the advances brought by modeling techniques, the specification of software systems still consists mostly in manually writing down requirements in natural language. Resorting to natural language to convey requirements has some advantages, such as its expressiveness and the stakeholders proficiency at using it for communication purposes, when compared with semi-formal or formal languages. However, ad-hoc natural language has intrinsic characteristics that make it error-prone, some of which may even hinder the effort of complying with good requirement criteria, regardless the usage of an automated requirements tools. To address this problem, within the scope of the ProjectIT initiative, a requirements specification language named ProjectIT-RSL was developed, based on common linguistic patterns. Despite covering several structural aspects of the software system under specification (e.g., actors, components, entities, properties, and relationships), ProjectIT-RSL still lacks the support for capturing behavioral concerns. This paper presents a Use Case Driven extension for ProjectIT-RSL , with the purpose of supporting the specification of functional requirements according to a controlled natural language approach. The proposed solution combines patterns from Use Case textual description best practices with Pseudocode specifications. Keywords-Requirements Engineering; Specification Language; Controlled Natural Language; Use Cases; Pseudocode.