RSL-PL: A linguistic pattern language for documenting software requirements

Software requirements are traditionally documented in natural language (NL). However, despite being easy to understand and having high expressivity, this approach often leads to well-known requirements quality problems. In turn, dealing with these problems warrants a significant amount of human effort, causing requirements development activities to be error-prone and time-consuming. This paper introduces RSL-PL, a language that enables the definition of linguistic patterns typically found in well-formed individual NL requirements, according to the field´s best practices. The linguistic features encoded within RSL-PL patterns enable the usage of information extraction techniques to automatically perform the linguistic analysis of NL requirements. Thus, in this paper we argue that RSL-PL can improve the quality of requirements specifications, as well as the productivity of requirements engineers, by mitigating the continuous effort that is often required to ensure requirements quality criteria, such as clearness, consistency, and completeness.