Towards Pattern-Driven Requirements Engineering: Development Patterns for Functional Requirements

A recent paper answered the question how to come from initial user wishes up to a running system in a straightforward, transparent, modular, traceable, feasible, and agile way. That paper sketched a complete development path for functional requirements, starting from user stories via use cases and their system sequence diagrams to a socalled information machine and then to a realization, an information system. To support that promising approach and increase its effectiveness, we now introduce development patterns for such development paths (focusing on functional requirements). We present the basic idea, several generally applicable development patterns (including patterns for the important and well-known class of CRUD functions), and various examples. This leads us into the direction of Pattern-Driven Requirements Engineering (PaDRE). To reach our goal we had to cross the boundaries of several (sub) disciplines such as requirements engineering, machine theory, and (database) systems development. Although we used (variants of) many existing ingredients, the strength of our approach also lies in the combination of the ingredients chosen (and the ones ignored).