Genetic Algorithms: A Practical Approach to Generate Textual Patterns for Requirements Authoring

The writing of accurate requirements is a critical factor in assuring the success of a project. Text patterns are knowledge artifacts that are used as templates to guide engineers in the requirements authoring process. However, generating a text pattern set for a particular domain is a time-consuming and costly activity that must be carried out by specialists. This research proposes a method of automatically generating text patterns from an initial corpus of high-quality requirements, using genetic algorithms and a separate-and-conquer strategy to create a complete set of patterns. Our results show this method can generate a valid pattern set suitable for requirements authoring, outperforming existing methods by 233%, with requirements ratio values of 2.87 matched per pattern found; as opposed to 1.23 using alternative methods.