A Norm-Based Approach towards Requirements Patterns

Requirements engineering is considered to be one of the crucial and at the same time difficult tasks during development process. It is considered to be one of the key factors causing software projects to fail since weak requirements engineering affects other phases and would be costly to correct later. Requirements engineering, to a large extent, is dependent on analysts´ experience. The process of requirements engineering often starts from scratch and depends on very much the analysts´ experience and educations. Using requirements pattern can help to overcome this. The patterns can be built and put in a repository. In a case of solving a problem, appropriate patterns can be retrieved and used for providing a solution to it. Therefore, knowledge will be reused and there is no need for starting from scratch. This paper is devoted to introducing patterns in requirements engineering process. Semiotics theory is used as the fundamental for creating and using patterns. Finally, a case study illustrates the usage of methods and approaches described in this paper.