Dimension-Oriented Inspection of Use Case-Based Requirements Specifications

摘要

Requirements inspection checklists are widely used in software projects to detect and correct requirements defects from specifications early in the development process. Unfortunately, to keep the checklists generic enough to be applicable to a wide range of systems specifications, checklist questions only help in detecting the most common types of requirements defects, not taking into consideration the peculiarities of different domains of software systems or application areas. In this paper, we argue that, when knowledge of a domain is available, augmenting common checklists with questions based on the knowledge of the domain can increase the effectiveness of the checklists in detecting requirements defects. Accordingly, we introduce a checklist-based approach for inspecting use case-based specifications of requirements, which is based on the statistical knowledge gained in a previous study about the frequency distribution of functional requirements classes in the specification of use cases in the domain of enterprise systems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through a case example.