Issues in Requirements Specification in Malaysia’s Public Sector: An Evidence from a Semi-Structured Survey and a Static Analysis

Abstract

Requirement specifications (RS) are essential and fundamental artefacts in system development. RS is the primary reference in software development and is commonly written in natural language. Bad requirement quality, such as requirement smells, may lead to project delay, cost overrun, and failure. Focusing on requirement quality in the Malaysian government, this paper investigates the methods for preparing Malay RS and personnel competencies to identify the root cause of this issue. We conducted semi-structured interviews that involved 17 respondents from eight critical Malaysian public sector agencies. This study found that ambiguity, incompleteness, and inconsistency are the top three requirement smells that cause project delays and failures. Furthermore, based on our static analysis, we collected the initial Malay RS documents from various Malaysian public sector agencies; we found that 30% of the RS were ambiguous. Our analysis also found that respondents with more than 10 years of experience could manually identify the smells in RS. Most respondents chose the Public Sector Application Systems Engineering (KRISA) handbook as a guideline for preparing Malay RS documents. Respondents acknowledged a correlation between the quality of RS and project delays and failures.