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Despite all efforts in creating and disseminating requirements modeling languages, natural language is still the dominant language for writing requirements specifications in practice. Furthermore, when documenting early requirements, natural language (in combination with pictures) outperforms today’s requirements modeling languages. In this paper, we present a vision and research roadmap for an ultralightweight requirements modeling language which can be used as easily as natural language with pictures, but has a visual structure with some lightweight semantics that allow the visual expression of hierarchical structure, context, general relationship, flow, and influence, while all the details are specified in natural language, both form-based and free-text. Furthermore, it should be possible to evolve parts of such an ultralightweight model into classic models of structure and behavior with full-fledged semantics by incrementally adding more formal model elements and tightening the meaning of the already existing ones. We envisage that such a modeling language – when supported by appropriate tools – will (1) outperform natural language requirements specifications with respect to comprehensibility, changeability, analyzability and internal traceability, (2) be simpler and more straightforward to read and create than today’s heavyweight modeling languages, (3) provide an effi- cient and effective means for expressing requirements at an early stage.

A Vision of an Ultralightweight Requirements Modeling Language

A Vision of an Ultralightweight Requirements Modeling Language

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