Lightweight validation of natural language requirements: a case study

Gervasi, Vincenzo; Nuseibeh, Bashar

doi:10.1109/icre.2000.855601

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Because each artifact has a different format (textual or graphical), and a different level of abstraction, the techniques for each artifact will be different. In the literature there are techniques that exist for inspection of requirements documents [Basili96], [Gervasi00], [Zhu02]; design documents [Laitenberger99], [Laitenberger00], [Travassos99]; code documents (e.g. [Linger79]); and even User Interfaces [Zhang99].…”

Section: Inspectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Background and Experience on Software Inspections

Carver

Basili²

2004

Empirical Software Engineering

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This dissertation is an initial study into the relationship between an inspector's characteristics and his or her effectiveness in an inspection. Research has shown that improving the individual effectiveness of the inspectors improves the overall effectiveness of an inspection team. But, the performance of inspectors varies widely, even when using the same inspection technique. This variation is often due to the inherent differences among the inspectors who used the technique. In order to better understand this variation and provide guidance to inspection planners, this dissertation has focused on the background and experience of the inspector as the source of variation.To study this issue I used a novel approach for software engineering, grounded theory. This methodology allowed hypotheses to be built both top-down, from the literature, as well as bottom-up, using data. The literature portion came from software engineering as well as education and psychology. The data portion came from both existing studies and newly designed studies. The data from existing studies allowed the initial hypotheses to become more concrete. Once some of the hypotheses had support from data, the final step was to design studies to test a subset of the hypotheses. I designed and ran two studies to test the selected hypotheses. The goal of the first study was to understand the type and level of experience with the software inspection process that was necessary. The earlier data had shown that process experience was important, but the effect of the type and level of experience was still unclear. The goal of the second study was to understand the interaction between an inspector's software development experience and the level of detail required in an inspection process. The earlier data had shown some indications that for experienced inspectors too much detail reduced the number of defects found, while less experienced inspectors needed more detail to overcome their lack of experience and find more defects. This dissertation presents complete list of hypotheses and the results of these studies along with some specific suggestions for both researchers and practitioners.

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Section: Inspectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Background and Experience on Software Inspections

Carver

Basili²

2004

Empirical Software Engineering

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“…The authors acknowledge the financial support of NASA under Cooperative Agreement #NCC 2-979, the UK EPSRC for the MISE (GR/L 55964) and VOICI (GR/M 38582) projects, the Italian MURST for the AI:IA project, and the EU for the RENOIR and PROMOTER 2 projects. This paper is a revised and expanded version of [36].…”

Section: Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lightweight validation of natural language requirements

Gervasi

Nuseibeh

2001

Softw Pract Exp

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SUMMARYIn this paper, we report on our experiences of using lightweight formal methods for the partial validation of natural language requirements documents. We describe our approach to checking properties of models obtained by shallow parsing of natural language requirements, and apply it to a case study based on part of a NASA specification of the Node Control Software on the International Space Station. The experience reported supports our position that it is feasible and useful to perform automated analysis of requirements expressed in natural language. Indeed, we identified a number of errors in our case study that were also independently discovered and corrected by NASA's Independent Validation and Verification Facility in a subsequent version of the same document, and others that were not discovered. The paper describes the techniques we used, the errors we found and reflects on the lessons learned.

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“…The continued interest in this issue has been reported by Gacitua et al (2010) who proposed a new technique for the identification of singleand multi-word abstractions named Relevance driven Abstraction Identification (RAI). Finally, Gervasi et al (1999) used lexical features of the requirements to cluster them according to specific criteria, thus obtaining several versions of the requirements document.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Replication of an experiment on linguistic tool support for consolidation of requirements from multiple sources

2011

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Large market-driven software companies continuously receive large numbers of requirements and change requests from multiple sources. The task of analyzing those requests against each other and against already analyzed or implemented functionality then recording similarities between them, also called the requirements consolidation task, may be challenging and time consuming. This paper presents a replicated experiment designed to further investigate the linguistic tool support for the requirements consolidation task. In this replication study, 45 subjects, working in pairs on the same set of requirements as in the original study, were assigned to use two methods for the requirements consolidation: (1) lexical similarity and (2) searching and filtering. The results show that the linguistic method used in this experiment is not more efficient in consolidating requirements than the searching and filtering method, which contradicts the findings of the original study. However, we confirm the previous results that the assisted method (lexical similarity) can deliver more correct links and miss fewer links than the manual method (searching and filtering).

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Lightweight validation of natural language requirements: a case study

Cited by 15 publications

References 30 publications

The Impact of Background and Experience on Software Inspections

The Impact of Background and Experience on Software Inspections

Lightweight validation of natural language requirements

Replication of an experiment on linguistic tool support for consolidation of requirements from multiple sources

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