CPRE-FL Module 5: Documenting Requirements in Natural Languages

Role of communication in RE
Natural language is the most important means to
communicate requirements
All stakeholders can communicate in natural
language
However, stakeholders may understand
requirements differently due to varying subject
knowledge and domain familiarities
Communication mediums also play a significant
role during communication
The sender encodes her message and the
receiver needs to decode it
Such a common code is intrinsic to any two
stakeholders that speak the same language
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Transformational effects in natural language

Effects of Natural Language
Natural language is inherently ambiguous and
can often be interpreted in multiple ways
Requirements engineers MUST place special
emphasis on potential ambiguities in
requirements statements to make them
unambiguous
Requirements are defined and read by people with
Different knowledge
Different social backgrounds and
Different experiences
The real needs are “deep structure” which may be expressed
differently “surface structures” due to “transformational
effects” that occur in human mind

Nouns without reference index
Nouns with missing or inadequate index of
reference
Examples of terms that contain incompletely
specified nouns are the user, the controller,
the system, the message, the data, or the
function
For example, the requirement “Users shall not
be allowed to update other user’s password”.
This is an example of nouns without reference
indices
This leads to the following questions: Which
user exactly?

Incompletely specified process verbs
Process verbs require more than one
noun to be considered completely
specified
For example, the verb “Communicate”
requires at least three aspects for
completeness:
What is being communicated
From where it is being communicated and
To where it is being communicated
Requirements
should be
formulated in
active voice rather
than passive voice

Requirements construct

Correct Option for Question 1
C. As per guidebook

Question 3
3. You are unfamiliar with a domain. The first thing you should do
is to
a. Creating a class model
b. Eliciting and documenting the quality requirement
c. Understand vocabulary for the domain
d. Applying role plays

C. All these techniques do not require significant
stakeholder involvement

Question 6
6. Interviews and Interface Analysis are techniques used during
which activity?
a. Conduct Elicitation
b. Prepare Documentation
c. Prepare the business needs assessment
d. Traceability

A. Definition

Question 9
9. The question, ‘How many cars are manufactured on any
given day?’ is an
a. An open - ended question
b. A stated requirement
c. A closed-ended question
d. A business need

B. Scribes take minutes of discussion

1
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CPRE-FL Module 5: Documenting Requirements in Natural Languages

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CPRE-FL Module 5: Documenting Requirements in Natural Languages