https://link-springer-com.ezproxy.ub.gu.se/article/10.1007%2Fs11219-020-09511-4
Working with software requirements and metrics is an important part of research in modern software companies. Although many of the companies are Agile or post-Agile, claiming that they do not have requirements, they still capture user needs in textual forms. For example, they describe user stories, epic, use cases.
This paper is an interesting view on the software requirements quality assessment. Instead of just calculating metrics and creating quality models, they use machine learning to mimic the way in which experts judge what is a good requirement and what is not. They use quality functions, and several of them, to distinguish between the good and bad requirements. Using multiple functions, in a multidimensional space, allows to select groups of requirements that are separated by the other class – the figures in the paper show more how this works in practice.
The summary of the gist of the paper is actually presented best in the introduction (quote): “Summing up, we can compute a set of quantitative metrics of textual requirements, and through them, we can assess the quality of requirements. However, the risk of this approach is to build assessment methods and tools that are both arbitrary in the parameterization of metrics and rigid in the combination of metrics to evaluate the different properties. This is why we propose in this work to develop a flexible assessment method that can be adapted to different contexts, with a high degree of automation. The method consists basically in the emulation of the experts’ judgment on quality through artificial intelligence techniques: first, obtain the expert’s implicit quality function through machine learning, and, second, apply this function to automatically assess the quality of textual requirements.
Our approach to emulate the experts’ judgment, as explained later in detail, is based on well-known machine learning techniques: we have a computer tool learn from a previous human-made classification of requirements according to their quality. Therefore, our work’s intent is not to improve machine learning techniques, but rather to devise a novel application to the field of requirements quality assessment.”
I strongly recommend to read the paper as it provides very good methods to work with requirements quality in many modern organisations.
