Open Access

REVIEW

An Evaluation of Value-Oriented Review for Software Requirements Specification

by Qiang Zhi^1,*, Shuji Morisaki²

1 Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, 152-8550, Japan
2 Nagoya University, Nagoya, 464-8601, Japan

* Corresponding Author: Qiang Zhi. Email:

Computer Systems Science and Engineering 2021, 37(3), 443-461. https://doi.org/10.32604/csse.2021.015157

Received 08 November 2020; Accepted 11 January 2021; Issue published 08 March 2021

Abstract

A software requirements specification (SRS) is a detailed description of a software system to be developed. This paper proposes and evaluates a lightweight review approach called value-oriented review (VOR) to detect defects in SRS. This approach comprises setting core values based on SRS and detecting the defects disturbing the core values. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conducted a controlled experiment to investigate whether reviewers could identify and record the core values based on SRS and find defects disturbing the core values. Results of the evaluation with 56 software engineers showed that 91% of the reviewers identified appropriate core values and 82% of the reviewers detected defects based on the identified core values. Furthermore, the average number of defects detected using the proposed approach was slightly smaller than that detected using perspective-based reading (PBR); however, PBR requires defining review scenarios before attempting to detect any defects. The results also demonstrated that the proposed approach helped reviewers detect the omission defects, which are more difficult to detect from SRS than defects because of ambiguity or incorrect requirements.

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Keywords

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