SUMMARYQuality requirements are scattered over a requirements specification, thus it is hard to measure and trace such quality requirements to validate the specification against stakeholders' needs. We proposed a technique called "spectrum analysis for quality requirements" which enabled analysts to sort a requirements specification to measure and track quality requirements in the specification. In the same way as a spectrum in optics, a quality spectrum of a specification shows a quantitative feature of the specification with respect to quality. Therefore, we can compare a specification of a system to another one with respect to quality. As a result, we can validate such a specification because we can check whether the specification has common quality features and know its specific features against specifications of existing similar systems. However, our first spectrum analysis for quality requirements required a lot of effort and knowledge of a problem domain and it was hard to reuse such knowledge to reduce the effort. We thus introduce domain knowledge called term-characteristic map (TCM) to reuse the knowledge for our quality spectrum analysis. Through several experiments, we evaluate our spectrum analysis, and main finding are as follows. First, we confirmed specifications of similar systems have similar quality spectra. Second, results of spectrum analysis using TCM are objective, i.e., different analysts can generate almost the same spectra when they analyze the same specification.
Quality requirements are scattered over a requirements specification, thus it is hard to measure and trace such quality requirements to validate the specification against stakeholders' needs. We have already proposed a technique called "spectrum analysis for quality requirements" which enables analysts to sort a requirements specification to measure and track quality requirements in the specification. However current spectrum analysis largely depends on expertise of each analyst, thus it takes a lot of efforts to perform the analysis and is hard to reuse experiences for such analysis. We introduce domain knowledge called term-characteristic map (TCM) to improve current spectrum analysis for quality requirements. Through several experiments, we evaluated the improved spectrum analysis.
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