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.
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Notes
- 1.
In a presentation after the study, another engineer reported that for a review it usually took multiple weeks until the original author received feedback. The person mentioned that after she received feedback, she herself, although being the original author, needed some time to understand the content again.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Daniel Méndez Fernández, Dominik Holling, and Jakob Mund for their reviews on drafts of this paper. We furthermore want to thank the participants of Munich Re, for their support of the study. This work was performed within the project Q-Effekt; it was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 01IS15003 A-B. The authors assume responsibility for the content.
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Femmer, H., Hauptmann, B., Eder, S., Moser, D. (2016). Quality Assurance of Requirements Artifacts in Practice: A Case Study and a Process Proposal. In: Abrahamsson, P., Jedlitschka, A., Nguyen Duc, A., Felderer, M., Amasaki, S., Mikkonen, T. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10027. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49094-6_36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49094-6_36
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