Automatic Requirements Engineering: Activities, Methods, Tools, and Domains – A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) is an initial activity in the software engineering process that involves many users. The involvement of various users in the RE process raises ambiguity and vagueness in requirements modeling. In addition, traditional RE is a time-consuming activity. Therefore various studies have been conducted to support process automation on RE. This paper conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) to obtain information about RE automation related to RE activities, methods/models, tools, and domains. SLR is done through 5 main stages: definition of research questions, conducting the search, screening for relevant papers, data extraction, mapping, and analysis. The data extraction and mapping are carried out on 155 relevant publications from 2016 to 2022. Based on the results from SLR, around 53% of the research focuses on RE automation in analysis and specifications, 40% focuses on elicitation, validation, and requirements management, and 7% focuses on requirements quality. NLP is the most used method in elicitation and specification, while for analysis, machine learning, NLP, and goal-oriented models are mostly used in automatic RE. Furthermore, many papers use specific models and methods for validation and requirements management. From the domain analysis results, it is obtained that more than half of the papers contribute directly to the RE domain, and some contribute to the development of RE automation in the software application domain.