Investigation of requirements documents written in natural language

1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralf Melchisedech
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Requirements Documents

From Textual Scenarios to Message Sequence Charts

2010 ◽  
pp. 83-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonid Kof
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Computational Linguistics ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Message Sequence Charts ◽  
Software Development Project ◽  
Requirement Document ◽  
Requirements Documents ◽  
Message Sequence Chart

Requirements engineering, the first phase of any software development project, is the Achilles’ heel of the whole development process, as requirements documents are often inconsistent and incomplete. In industrial requirements documents natural language is the main presentation means. In such documents, the system behavior is specified in the form of use cases and their scenarios, written as a sequence of sentences in natural language. For the authors of requirements documents some facts are so obvious that they forget to mention them. This surely causes problems for the requirements analyst. By the very nature of omissions, they are difficult to detect by document reviews: Facts that are too obvious to be written down at the time of document writing, mostly remain obvious at the time of review. In such a way, omissions stay undetected. This book chapter presents an approach that analyzes textual scenarios with the means of computational linguistics, identifies where actors or whole actions are missing from the text, completes the missing information, and creates a message sequence chart (MSC) including the information missing from the textual scenario. Finally, this MSC is presented to the requirements analyst for validation. The book chapter presents also a case study where scenarios from a requirement document based on industrial specifications were translated to MSCs. The case study shows feasibility of the approach.

Towards an Approach for Evaluating the Quality of Requirements

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faisal Mokammel ◽  
Eric Coatanea ◽  
Francois Christophe ◽  
Mohamed Ba Khouya ◽  
Galina Medyna
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Software Tool ◽  
Quality Measures ◽  
Requirement Model ◽  
Requirements Quality ◽  
Holistic Assessment ◽  
Requirements Documents

In engineering design, the needs of stakeholders are often captured and expressed in natural language (NL). While this facilitates such tasks as sharing information with non-specialists, there are several associated problems including ambiguity, incompleteness, understandability, and testability. Traditionally, these issues were managed through tedious procedures such as reading requirements documents and looking for errors, but new approaches are being developed to assist designers in collecting, analysing, and clarifying requirements. The quality of the end-product is strongly related to the clarity of requirements and, thus, requirements should be managed carefully. This paper proposes to combine diverse requirements quality measures found from literature. These metrics are coherently integrated in a single software tool. This paper also proposes a new metric for clustering requirements based on their similarity to increase the quality of requirement model. The proposed methodology is tested on a case study and results show that this tool provides designers with insight on the quality of individual requirements as well as with a holistic assessment of the entire set of requirements.

scholarly journals Quality Assurance Techniques in SRS Documents

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2S) ◽  
pp. 14-18
Keyword(s):  
Quality Assurance ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Software Requirements ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Software Development Process ◽  
Language Analysis ◽  
Requirements Quality ◽  
Requirements Documents ◽  
Experimental Stage ◽  
Foundation Stone

For development of software, the most important aspects are the software requirements. They are the foundation stone for initiating any software development process. Software requirements documents contain the needs of the customers in natural language. By using various methods like reviews, inspections, walkthroughs, the content of the software requirement can be checked manually to reduce ambiguity. In recent years there is an attempt to automate these activities as a result of advancement in automation of natural language analysis. Automation of text mining techniques and text analysis is leading to feasibility of automation of requirements documents processing. The process can be completed in minutes now which were taking weeks earlier. Automation of analysis of text has triggered numerous possibilities for quality assurance of requirements. The possibilities of automation are model checking automation, automated rule checking, automated test case execution and measurement automation. In future more tools will enter the scene for automation of requirements quality assurance. At present most of them are in experimental stage. There is a definite need for more research in this field.

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