Inventing Requirements from Software: An Empirical Investigation with Web Services

Service-centric software systems offer new opportunities for requirements processes. This paper reports a new tool designed to increase the completeness of system  requirements using information about designs and  implementations of web services. It presents an algorithm  for retrieving web services in domains that are analogical to a current requirements problem, to support creative thinking about requirements for that problem. It describes how the algorithm parses and analogically matches natural language descriptions of system requirements and web service descriptions. The paper also reports 2 evaluations of the tool that demonstrate improvements to specifications of requirements for a system in the automotive domain.