SRCM: A Semi Formal Requirements Representation Model Enabling System Visualisation and Quality Checking

Requirements engineering is pivotal to the successful development of any given system. The core artifact for such phase is the requirements specification document. Requirements can be specified in informal, semiformal, and formal notations. The majority of the requirements across many fields and domains are written natural language. However, natural language is inherently ambiguous and imprecise and the requirements cannot be automatically validated. Formal notations on the other hand enable automated testing and validation but is only comprehensible by experts and requires rewriting the requirements. Semi-formal notations strikes a good balance between comprehension and checking for several systems. However, the majority of the existing representation models mandates the requirements to be (re)written to adhere to certain templates. They also do not support automated checking. In this paper, we present SRCM –a semi-formal requirements representation model based on a comprehensive requirements capturing model (RCM) that does not enforce much limitations on how the requirements can be written. We also provide an automated approach to construct SRCM from RCM. In addition to providing a unified visualisation of the system entities and relations between the requirements key components, SRCM also enables automated quality checking on the requirements.