An experimental investigation of reusable requirements retrieval

Building a requirements library allows practitioners to better leverage reuse since they can work on the abstractions closer to the software system´s initial concepts. However, little research has explored how to retrieve requirements profiles to answer user´s queries to the library. This paper presents an experimental investigation of retrieving functional requirements profiles. We assessed the effect of two factors: basic retrieval method and synonym support, and found that: 1) no significant differences in retrieval effectiveness were detected among the methods, but recall was significantly improved by having synonym support; 2) searching times were significantly different; and 3) different methods indeed retrieved different items.