A survey on requirements notations in software engineering research
Larissa Mangolim Amaral, Fábio Levy Siqueira, Anarosa A. F. Brandão · Proceedings of the 37th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing · 2022
Requirements can be documented using different notations that vary, for example, on expressivity, formality, and visualization. Each of them have advantages and disadvantages on different contexts. In fact, there is not much information on which and how requirements notations are being used, most of all when considering not only the Software Engineering industry, but also its research community. Therefore, this study investigates researchers' applications for requirements notations. Furthermore, we explore their reasoning behind the choice for a notation and how formally these notations are defined. First we reviewed the literature to identify general requirements notations and their definition methods. Then, we conducted a survey study with Software Engineering researchers, asking them about the notations they have used. We received 251 usable responses from 24 countries. Our main findings are that participants' preferred notations are Use Case, Class Diagram, and User Stories; and they choose notations based mainly on their suitability to the problem, their adequacy to the stakeholders, and common usage.