Listens Learned (8 Lessons Learned Applying EARS)

The Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS) is an approach for authoring natural language requirements using a simple template with an underlying ruleset. EARS applies a series of keywords to denote separate clauses within a requirement. Application of the template produces natural language requirements in a small number of patterns. EARS has proved popular with practitioners for numerous reasons. It is lightweight, easy to learn and easy to use. It helps authors to write clear, simple requirements that are easy to read and easy to check for errors. In this paper, four experienced EARS practitioners reflect on their experiences of applying the approach in numerous projects in diverse domains over a six year period. The paper provides an overview of the types of project in which EARS was implemented and describes the deployment methods used. During the course of these projects, numerous lessons were learned. The EARS practitioners discussed the lessons to reduce bias and to ensure the generalizability of the results. These include eleven general lessons concerning requirements engineering, elicitation and natural language specification. The main contribution of the paper is the eight key EARS-specific lessons learned during these deployments. These lessons learned are generalized and will scale to any EARS deployment. The lessons learned will be beneficial to practitioners who wish to deploy EARS in their own projects.