CRUDE (CRUD + Entity) Structure to Help Unambiguous Functional Requirement Specification in Natural Language

This work presents a methodology for specifying unambiguous functional requirements. It is based on filling out a format with three main sections, namely: title, short definition, and detailed description. To define the title, a syntactic model based on CRUD operations applied to an entity is proposed. To evaluate the goodness of the methodology, 46 requirements specification documents elaborated as homework by students from the RE courses offered at the University of Guayaquil were assessed quantitatively. According to the results, the percentage of ambiguous requirements dropped from 80% to approximately 10% thanks to the use of the proposed methodology. Moreover, most ambiguities in functional requirements originate in the requirement title specification. Conversely, it is considerably simpler to construct an unambiguous requirement when the title is clear. All in all, the results highlight the importance of the proposed methodology to help the student in the specification of unambiguous requirements.