Quality assurance of requirements artifacts in practice: A case study and a process proposal

Abstract

Requirements artifacts build the basis for various software engineering activities, such as development, testing or effort estimations. As such, the quality of requirements artifacts impacts the efficiency and effectiveness of these activities. Consequently, requirements artifacts should be subject to quality assurance (QA). Unfortunately, QA of requirements artifacts struggles in practice. We contribute a first industrial case study, in which we found that the main problems in QA for requirements artifacts were a missing common quality understanding, the low feedback speed, low efficiency in the QA process, and, consequently, the lack of creating a sustaining QA processes. Based on these results, we furthermore contribute a process for requirements artifact QA that is designed to address these problems. We discuss feasibility and impact of the process with industry, who acknowledge its potential to increase efficiency and to provide a more sustaining QA process in practice.