On The Impact of Passive Voice Requirements on Domain Modelling

Context: The requirements specification is a central arte- fact in the software engineering (SE) process, and its quality (might) influence downstream activities like implementation or testing. One quality defect that is often mentioned in standards is the use of passive voice. However, the con- sequences of this defect are still unclear. Goal: We need to understand whether the use of passive voice in requirements has an influence on other activities in SE. In this work we focus on domain modelling. Method: We designed an experiment, in which we ask students to draw a domain model from a given set of requirements written in active or passive voice. We compared the completeness of the resulting domain model by counting the number of missing actors, domain objects and their associations with respect to a specified solution. Results: While we could not see a difference in the number of missing actors and objects, participants which received passive sentences missed almost twice the associations. Conclusion: Our experiment indicates that, against common knowledge, actors and objects in a requirement can often be understood from the context. However, the study also shows that passive sentences complicate understanding how certain domain concepts are interconnected

THE APPROACH TO MEASUREMENT OF REQUIREMENT QUALITY BY APPLICATION OF GENERALIZED PRIORITIZED FUZZY CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION PROBLEM

The requirement quality affects product development at all lifecycle stages, as well as the end product. Poorly defined requirements bring to extended deadlines, increased financial costs, even to project disruption. Current researches related to the good quality of requirements include characteristics of good requirements and the development of new elicitation techniques. Requirement quality evaluation should be tailored both to the professionals and users who defined requirements according to their needs. Therefore, the model is designed for requirement quality measurement based on the characteristics of good requirements by application of the Generalized Prioritized Fuzzy Constraint Satisfaction Problem. The model enables the participation of selected characteristics of good requirements in quality evaluation, according to priorities. The evaluator obtains information if the requirement satisfies the given quality satisfaction threshold based on the degree of fulfillment of selected characteristics of a good requirement. The model is applied to all types of requirements, as well as to the evaluation of requirements at all software development lifecycle stages

A semi-automatic verification tool for software requirements specification documents

Most software problems arise from deficiencies in the manner in which software requirements are elicited and expressed. Ensuring that the Software Requirements Specification document (SRS) has the necessary quality is crucial to the success of any software development project, since its information is used across all project stages. In this paper, we present a semiautomatic verification tool for SRS documents based on a comprehensive quality model.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

Software Requirements Quality Evaluation: State of the art and research challenges

Quality models are important tools for quality management. In software development projects, they are useful as predictive tools for assessing the state of the product being developed and the process used. In order to achieve software quality, a high-quality Software Requirements Specification (SRS) is required. This document is generated at the beginning of a software development project, and is used in all stages. Thus, it is essential to evaluate the quality of the SRS in order to be able to take early corrective and enhancement actions. However, assessing the quality of a SRS is not a simple process, mainly by the multitude of proposals, often contradictory, of the attributes to be evaluated and the methodologies used for that purpose. Thus, it is mandatory to consider proven quality models for guiding this evaluation process. Related to this, this work performs an exploratory analysis of various quality models proposed in this area which can be used as a basis for SRS quality evaluation. Moreover, the work is intended to be a compendium of the most important tendencies and strategies in the field that serves as a starting point for developing comprehensive models and tools for quality attributes evaluation in a SRS.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Software Requirements Quality Evaluation: State of the art and research challenges

Quality models are important tools for quality management. In software development projects, they are useful as predictive tools for assessing the state of the product being developed and the process used. In order to achieve software quality, a high-quality Software Requirements Specification (SRS) is required. This document is generated at the beginning of a software development project, and is used in all stages. Thus, it is essential to evaluate the quality of the SRS in order to be able to take early corrective and enhancement actions. However, assessing the quality of a SRS is not a simple process, mainly by the multitude of proposals, often contradictory, of the attributes to be evaluated and the methodologies used for that purpose. Thus, it is mandatory to consider proven quality models for guiding this evaluation process. Related to this, this work performs an exploratory analysis of various quality models proposed in this area which can be used as a basis for SRS quality evaluation. Moreover, the work is intended to be a compendium of the most important tendencies and strategies in the field that serves as a starting point for developing comprehensive models and tools for quality attributes evaluation in a SRS.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Automation of Invoice Process

This project has been carried out to automate the Billing Invoice Process fee calculation in an organization which provides software solutions to the Medical Device industry and integrated tele-health services. This Billing Invoice Application is built to create a Sale agreement for a new customer, Fee calculation and generate the Invoice for a customer. This project provides the functionality to calculate the fee before generating the Invoice of a customer. This system provides the functionality to manage monthly service fee and ASP fee, Supply fee, Shipping fee, Refurbishing fee, Miscellaneous Parts fee and also manages Bundle fee depends on the devices ordered by a customer. It also manages the fee calculation in an individual patient level. The current process of dealing with the fee calculation should be replaced in a manner such that only a new customer’s sale agreement should be set up manually as per the customer’s contract and moving forward from that point, all the actions like bundling the devices based on customers order and transaction type, determining the price tier, calculating the all fees, generating the Invoice report etc., should be automated and the users should be able to monitor and have control over all the actions if necessary

Textual Analysis by using Knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation Approach

Textual analysis had been widely used in the software engineering area. Even though some approaches had been suggested over the time, these approaches encounter number of challenges, especially dealing with information extracted from the text requirement. Most studies had chosen to analyse the text manually in order to overcome this challenge. However, the long and complex text would consume more time. This paper will discuss a framework based on the knowledgebased word sense disambiguation approach, an attempt to improve the knowledge representation. In this approach, WordNet 2.1 would be used as the knowledge source used to identify concepts represented by each word in a text

Which Requirements Artifact Quality Defects are Automatically Detectable? A Case Study

[Context:] The quality of requirements engineeringartifacts, e.g. requirements specifications, is acknowledged tobe an important success factor for projects. Therefore, manycompanies spend significant amounts of money to control thequality of their RE artifacts. To reduce spending and improvethe RE artifact quality, methods were proposed that combinemanual quality control, i.e. reviews, with automated approaches.[Problem:] So far, we have seen various approaches to auto-matically detect certain aspects in RE artifacts. However, westill lack an overview what can and cannot be automaticallydetected. [Approach:] Starting from an industry guideline forRE artifacts, we classify 166 existing rules for RE artifacts alongvarious categories to discuss the share and the characteristics ofthose rules that can be automated. For those rules, that cannotbe automated, we discuss the main reasons. [Contribution:] Weestimate that 53% of the 166 rules can be checked automaticallyeither perfectly or with a good heuristic. Most rules need onlysimple techniques for checking. The main reason why some rulesresist automation is due to imprecise definition. [Impact:] Bygiving first estimates and analyses of automatically detectable andnot automatically detectable rule violations, we aim to provide anoverview of the potential of automated methods in requirementsquality control