SpecQua: Towards a framework for requirements specifications with increased quality

Abstract

Requirements specifications describe multiple technical concerns of a system and are used throughout the project life-cycle to help sharing a system’s common understanding among multiple stakeholders. The interest to support the definition and the management of system requirements specifications (SRSs) is evident by the diversity of many generic and RE-specific tools. However, little work has been done in what concerns the quality of SRSs. Indeed, most recommended practices are mainly focused on human-intensive tasks, mainly dependent on domain experts, and so, these practices tend to be time-consuming, error-prone and unproductive. This paper proposes and discusses an innovative approach to mitigate this status, and defends that with proper tool support – such as the SpecQua framework discussed in the paper –, we can increase the overall quality of SRSs as well as we can increase the productivity associated to traditional tasks of RE such as documentation and validation.