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.