A linguistic patterns approach for requirements specification

Despite the efforts made to overcome the problems associated with the development of information systems, we must consider that it is still an immature activity, with negative consequences in time, budget and quality. One of the root causes for this situation is the fact that many projects do not follow a structured, standard and systematic approach, like the methodologies and best practices proposed by Software Engineering. In this paper, we present a requirements specification language, called ProjectIT-RSL, based on the identification of the most frequently used linguistic patterns in requirements documents, written in natural language. To guarantee the consistency of the written requirements and the integration with generative programming tools, the requirements are analyzed by parsing tools, and immediately validated according with the syntactic and semantic rules of the language.