The definition of high-quality or good RE artifacts is often provided through normative references, such as quality standards or text books (e.g., ISO/IEEE/IEC-29148). We see various problems of such normative references.
Quality standards are incomplete. Several quality standards describe quality through a set of abstract criteria. When analyzing the characteristics in detail, we see that there are two different types of criteria: Some criteria, such as ambiguity, consistency, completeness, and singularity are factors that describe properties of the RE artifact itself. In contrast, feasibility, traceability and verifiability state that activities can be performed with the artifact. This is a small, yet important difference: While the former can be assessed by analyzing just the artifact by itself, the latter describe a relationship of the artifact in the context of its usage. Yet this usage context is incompletely represented in the quality standards: For example, why is it important that requirements can be implemented (feasible in the terminology of ISO-29148) and verified, but other activities, such as maintenance, are not part of the quality model? Therefore, we argue that normative standards do not take all activities into account systematically, and thus, are missing relevant quality factors.
Quality standards are only implicitly context-dependent. One could go even further and ask about the value of some artifact-based properties such as singularity. A normative approach does not provide such rationales. This is different for activity-based properties, such as verifiability, since these properties are defined through their usage: If we need to verify the requirements, properties of the artifact that increase verifiability are important. If we do not need to verify this requirement, e.g., because we use the artifacts only for task management in an agile process, these properties might not necessarily be relevant. This example shows that, in contrast to the normative definition of quality in RE standards, RE quality usually depends on the context.
Quality standards lack precise reasoning. For defining most of the aforementioned criteria, the standards remain abstract and vague. For some criteria, such as ambiguity, the standards provide a detailed lists of factors to avoid. However, these criteria have an imprecise relation to the abstract criteria mentioned above, and, consequently, the harm that they might potentially cause remains unclear
