Paper Info
Title
Rapid requirements checks with requirements smells: two case studies
Abstract
Bad requirements quality can have expensive consequences during the software development lifecycle. Especially, if iterations are long and feedback comes late - the faster a problem is found, the cheaper it is to fix. We propose to detect issues in requirements based on requirements (bad) smells by applying a light-weight static requirements analysis. This light-weight technique allows for instant checks as soon as a requirement is written down. In this paper, we derive a set of smells, including automatic smell detection, from the natural language criteria of the ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148 standard. We evaluated the approach with 336 requirements and 53 use cases from 9 specifications that were written by the car manufacturer Daimler AG and the chemical business company Wacker Chemie AG, and discussed the results with their requirements and domain experts. While not all problems can be detected, the case study shows that lightweight smell analysis can uncover many practically relevant requirements defects. Based on these results and the discussion with our industry partners, we conclude that requirements smells can serve as an efficient supplement to traditional reviews or team discussions, in order to create fast feedback on requirements quality.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2593812.2593817
RCoSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
analytical quality assurance,requirements engineering,requirements smells,requirements/specifications
Systems engineering,Software engineering,Computer science,Requirements analysis,Requirements management,Requirements elicitation,Business requirements,Requirement,Software requirements specification,Reliability engineering,Non-functional requirement,Requirements traceability
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
18
0.77
17
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Henning Femmer115816.72
Daniel Méndez Fernández231234.66
Elmar Juergens374331.07
Michael Klose4181.11
Ilona Zimmer5180.77
Jörg Zimmer6180.77