Natural language requirements documents are often verified
by means of some reading technique. Some recommendations
for defining a good reading technique point out
that a concrete technique must not only be suitable for specific
classes of defects, but also for a concrete notation in
which requirements are written. Following this suggestion,
we have proposed a metric–based reading (MBR) technique
used for requirements inspections, whose main goal is to
identify specific types of defects in use cases. The systematic
approach of MBR is basically based on a set of rules as
”if the metric value is too low (or high) the presence of defects
of type must be checked”. We
hypothesised that if the reviewers know these rules, the inspection
process is more effective and efficient, which means
that the defects detection rate is higher and the number of
defects identified per unit of time increases. But this hypotheses
lacks validity if it is not empirically validated. For
that reason the main goal of this paper is to describe a controlled
experiment we carried out to ascertain if the usage of
MBR really helps in the detection of defects in comparison
with a simple Checklist technique. The experiment result revealed
that MBR reviewers were more effective at detecting
defects than Checklist reviewers, but they were not more efficient,
because MBR reviewers took longer than Checklist
reviewers on average.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC 2003-02737-C02-01Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC2003-07804-C05-0
