RISDM: A requirements inspection systems design methodology: Perspective-based design of the pragmatic quality model and question set to SRS

Abstract

The quality of the SRS (Software Requirements Specification) is the key to the success of software development. The inspection for the verification and validation of SRS are widely practiced, however, the techniques of inspection are rather ad hoc, and largely depend on the knowledge and skill of the people. This article proposes RISDM (Requirements Inspection Systems Design Methodology) to design the RIS (Requirements Inspection System) to be conducted by a thirdparty inspection team. The RISDM includes a meta-model and design process of RIS, PQM (Pragmatic Quality Model) of SRS, and a technique to generate inspection question set based on the PQM and PBR (Perspective-Based Reading). We have been applying the RIS designed by the proposed RISDM to more than 140 projects of a wide variety of software systems in NTT DATA for five years. By analyzing the statistics from the experience, we discovered some key quality characteristics of SRS reveal strong correlation to the project cost and level of quality to be used for evaluating the maturity of the SRS and predicting the risk.