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On the Ability of Lightweight Checks to Detect Ambiguity in Requirements Documentation

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Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10153))

Abstract

Context & motivation: The quality of requirements documentation, which is often written in natural language, directly influences the quality of subsequent software engineering tasks. Ambiguity is one of the main quality risks, but unfortunately natural language has a natural tendency towards ambiguity.

Question/problem: Precisely identifying ambiguity in specifications is virtually impossible fully automatically due the complexity and variability of natural language. Ignoring grammar and context in the analysis, on the other hand, makes an implementation and application feasible, but also reduces the accuracy. The question researched in this paper is whether such a lightweight check can still sufficiently accurately detect which requirements are formulated ambiguously or certainly.

Principal ideas/results: To investigate this research question, we have implemented a lightweight analysis tool based on a finite dictionary combining different results from the literature. The tool, called tactile check, adds annotations to phrases in requirements documents, which are weak respectively strong with regard to non-ambiguity. Within an embedded single case study, tactile check is applied to two real requirements documents (totaling 293 requirements) from KLM Engineering & Maintenance and the results (454 annotations in total) are assessed by three expert business analysts. In our study, the tool achieved a precision and recall of at least 77% respectively 59%. Annotations of weak phrases have prevalently been perceived as helpful for reducing ambiguity.

Contribution: In this paper, we establish that simple textual analyses with low overhead can detect ambiguity in requirements with significant accuracy. Our experts assessed the analysis’ findings as helpful input to reducing the ambiguity. The tool and dictionary used in our study are provided for download to support repeatability of the study. Furthermore, we provide an extended dictionary for download that incorporates suggestions by our experts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See the Tactile Check homepage: https://github.com/mwmk67/TactileCheck.

  2. 2.

    See the Tactile Check homepage: https://github.com/mwmk67/TactileCheck.

  3. 3.

    The strong phrases “and” and “should” occur extremely frequently in similar sentence patterns. To save the limited time of our expert analysts, we asked them to only assess 15 occurrences of these two phrases. All assessments are almost identical.

  4. 4.

    An extended dictionary containing the additional phrases can be found at https://github.com/mwmk67/TactileCheck.

  5. 5.

    See https://github.com/mwmk67/TactileCheck.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Open Universiteit, Heerlen, The Netherlands

    Martin Wilmink

  2. Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

    Christoph Bockisch

Authors
  1. Martin Wilmink
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  2. Christoph Bockisch
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christoph Bockisch .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

    Paul Grünbacher

  2. Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy

    Anna Perini

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Wilmink, M., Bockisch, C. (2017). On the Ability of Lightweight Checks to Detect Ambiguity in Requirements Documentation. In: Grünbacher, P., Perini, A. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10153. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54045-0_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54045-0_23

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-54044-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-54045-0

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