A Live Extensible Ontology of Quality Factors for Textual Requirements

A Live Extensible Ontology of Quality Factors for Textual Requirements

“…The ABRE-QM example above raises the concern that requirements quality researchers do not properly utilize the activity-based approach successfully employed in software quality research. In this manuscript, we want to encourage further research on this approach by presenting a revised requirements quality theory, a thorough investigation of the requirements quality literature verifying the hypotheses from previous studies [6,7], and a consequent research roadmap.…”

“…Similar to software quality, requirements quality research historically originated from proposing metrics like passive voice of requirements sentences [43] or sentence length [44], which are associated with bad quality of requirements specifications. Frattini et al [7] collected these quality factors and indicated their limitations. Most existing publications either fail to gauge the impact of these metrics [45] or explicitly disregard their relationship [46].…”

“…This model leverages the insights from activity-based software quality models [15,17,33] and shows that the quality of requirements depends on the impact they have on the activities in which they are used. However, despite the authors' call for action [53], ABRE-QM saw little adoption in research as demonstrated in recent systematic investigations of the requirements quality literature [6,7]. The ABRE-QM example above raises the concern that requirements quality researchers do not properly utilize the activity-based approach successfully employed in software quality research.…”

“…Requirements quality research is dedicated to supporting the software engineering process with the means to evaluate and improve the quality of requirements, mainly focusing on requirements artifacts [5]. However, recent systematic investigations of requirements quality literature revealed a lack of rigor and relevance of these contributions [6,7]. Moreover, the impact of the quality factors proposed in literature (i.e., requirements writing rules) remains largely unexplored in practice [7], hindering its adoption in industry [8][9][10][11].…”

“…However, recent systematic investigations of requirements quality literature revealed a lack of rigor and relevance of these contributions [6,7]. Moreover, the impact of the quality factors proposed in literature (i.e., requirements writing rules) remains largely unexplored in practice [7], hindering its adoption in industry [8][9][10][11].…”