Software Requirements Modeling: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Software requirements modeling (SRM) is a subprocess of requirements engineering (RE) which is used to elicit and represent the need of the stakeholders. Different systematic literature reviews (SLR) have been performed in different areas of RE like requirements elicitation, stakeholder identification, requirements prioritization, use case models, etc. Despite the availability of different SRM techniques, less attention is given to synthesize the existing SRM techniques in the context of the unified modeling language (UML) and goal oriented techniques like “ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Knowledge </sub> <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Acquisition </sub> <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">for </sub> <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Automated </sub> <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Specifications</sub> ” (KAOS), I* framework, non-functional requirements (NFR) framework, and Tropos, etc. Therefore, to address this issue, in this paper we present the SLR by analysing the existing SRM techniques based on the following formulated research questions (RQs): (a) how UML and goal oriented techniques were evolved? (b) which modeling techniques are appropriate for modeling the NFRs? (c) what are the tools available for modeling the different types of the software requirements, i.e., functional and nonfunctional requirements? Search items were extracted from the RQs to identify the primary studies from the Journals, Conferences, Workshops, and Symposium. Our SLR has identified 56 distinct studies which have been published from 2008 to 2019. Selected studies were assessed according to the formulated RQs for their quality and coverage to specific SRM technique thus identifying some gaps in the literature. We observed that there is need to develop the SRM techniques for representing the different types of the NFRs; and also to strengthen the UML by integrating the NFRs and multi-criteria decision making techniques.