Software Special Interest Group Meeting  

In software development projects where written requirements are produced, a requirements document summarizes the results of the requirements analysis and becomes the basis for subsequent software development.  In many cases, the quality of the requirements documents dictates the success of the software development.  The need for determining the quality of requirements documents is particularly acute when the target applications are large, complicated, and mission critical.  The goal of this research is to develop quality indicators of the quality of requirements statements in a requirements document.  To achieve the goal, the content goodness properties of the requirements statements are adopted to represent the quality of requirements statements.  A suite of complexity metrics of requirements statements is proposed as the quality indicators and is developed based upon research of noun phrase (NP) chunks.  A two phased empirical case study is performed to evaluate the usage of the proposed metrics.  By focusing upon the complexity metrics based on NP chunks, the research aided in development of complexity indicators of low quality requirements statements of requirements documents.

Chao Yun Din is a senior consultant with NuWave Solutions.  He has been a practitioner of software engineering for more than 20 years.  His research interests include Requirements Engineering, Software Development Process, and Cyber Security.  He received a PhD in Information Technology at George Mason University.  He is a member of IEEE and ACM.  Contact him at cdin@computer.org.

Details and driving directions at: May 2013 Software SIG Announcement