Process metrics for requirements analysis

Abstract

In this paper we propose a class of process metrics based on the continuous monitoring of product attributes. Two such metrics are defined for the requirements analysis process, namely stability (i.e., how smoothly the process of introducing information in a requirements document flows) and efficiency (i.e., which part of the effort of the analysts is spent in reworks). These measures can be used for the timely identification of risky trends in a requirements analysis process. The paper also gives some results from an experiment on the collection and use of the measures we introduced

An industrial case study on requirements volatility measures

“…As can be observed in figure 1, use case modelling was the only technique used in the host project to describe requirements (besides the vision document, which contains only sketchy requirements). The abstraction level of the UCMs was high enough to be considered as requirements and not initial designs 1 . Drafts of the UCMs were used to communicate requirements to the external customer.…”

“…Studies show that requirements volatility has a high impact on project performance [40,44]. Several aspects of requirements volatility have been studied, for example its impact on project or process performance [2,14,21,30,33,39,40,44], assessment and prediction [1,7,8,19], simulation models [14,33], and sources and causes of volatility [17,31,39,40]. Zowghi and Nurmuliani [44] perform an empirical study on requirements volatility and its impact on project performance.…”

“…However, even in the case of well-documented requirements, measures have to be tailored towards the particular organisation because each company has its own way of documenting requirements. Among the measures in table 1, only Ambriola and Gervasi [1] describe an empirical validation of the measures, showing that the stability measure had a high predictive value of risky trends in a requirements analysis process. The reason for validating measures is to empirically demonstrate their practical utility [13,23,38].…”

Mind the gap: assessing the conformance of software traceability to relevant guidelines

“…For example, Ambriola and Gervasi developed a set of process metrics for evaluating stability and efficiency of the requirements analysis process [1]. Their metrics were designed to identify risky or inefficient behavior during the requirements analysis process, so that managers could take corrective actions.…”

Lightweight validation of natural language requirements: a case study

“…Moreover, the low computational and human costs strongly suggest that our techniques could be used successfully during requirements writing and evolution ‡ ‡ . We believe that the application of similar techniques could also help in tracking the quality of a specification between full releases and inspections, thus providing finer grain monitoring of the RE process [34] and to some extent validating changes that are requested and implemented.…”