Software Requirements Retrieval Using Use Case Terms and Structure Similarity Computation

For a large scale of software development, there is a tremendous number of software requirements documents in a collection which may be produced for different domains by different developer teams. They may be later reused to reduce cost and time for the next development. Thus, there is a need to retrieve ones that meet user´s need efficiently. This paper presents an approach for software requirements specification retrieval in a form of use case description using use case structure and similarity computation between terms of use case query and use cases in the collection. The contribution of the paper has five main points; 1) the approach for retrieving use case description is proposed, 2) the developed tool supporting the approach is presented, 3) the experiment is designed to measure effectiveness of the approach, 4) the results of the experiment are shown to compare effectiveness of the approach to that of a general approach, and finally 5) the recommended use case description query template is proposed.