Leveraging Requirements Elicitation through Software Requirement Patterns and LLMs

[Context and motivation] Software requirement patterns (SRPs) is one of the many techniques that contribute to requirements elicitation. At this respect, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) opens the door to cost-effective strategies to create and use SRPs. Still, the stochastic nature of LLMs threatens the inherent quality of requirements reuse and consequently, that of the elicitation process. [Question/problem] In this scientific evaluation paper, we investigate whether and how LLMs can be used in order to create an SRP catalogue and elicit requirements from it. [Principal ideas/results] SRPs can be effectively extracted by querying an LLM through appropriate prompts, but still expert assessment is key in order to deliver the best results. LLM-driven generation of questions to stakeholders for eliciting requirements from these SRPs is feasible but suffers from deficiencies such as excessive number of repetitions and out of scope requirements. [Contribution] We show that (1) LLMs can be embedded into the requirements elicitation process through a pattern instantiation-based strategy, but at the same time (2) the current state of LLM technologies requires expert assessment at a large extent.