ReqCompletion: Domain-Enhanced Automatic Completion for Software Requirements

Software requirements are the driving force behind software development. As the cornerstone of the entire software lifecycle, the efficiency of crafting requirement specifications and the quality of these requirements significantly influence the duration of software development. Despite massive research on requirements elicitation, the reality is that requirements are often painstakingly crafted manually, word by word. This manual process is not only time-consuming but also prone to issues such as the misuse of terminology. To address these challenges, we introduce ReqCompletion, an approach designed to recommend the next token in real-time for given prefix of requirements description. ReqCompletion comprises two primary components. First, we have devised and integrated a knowledge-injection module into GPT-2—which stands as the largest available GPT model that allows for fine-tuning on specialized downstream tasks. This injection imbues GPT-2 with richer domain-specific knowledge, thus improving the relevance of the suggested tokens. Additionally, we employ a pointer network to optimize the recommendation quality by utilizing completed requirements as contextual support. Empirical evaluations using two public datasets demonstrate that ReqCompletion surpasses all baselines in performance (Recall@7 gains up to 65.87% than the second-best model). Furthermore, the effectiveness of its two pivotal design elements has been substantiated through rigorous ablation studies. The utility of our work has been evaluated preliminarily through a small user study.