Abstract

Research has repeatedly shown that high-quality requirements are essential for the success of development projects. While the term “quality” is pervasive in the field of requirements engineering and while the body of research on requirements quality is large, there is no meta-study of the field that overviews and compares the concrete quality attributes addressed by the community. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a systematic mapping study of the scientific literature. We retrieved 6905 articles from six academic databases, which we filtered down to 105 relevant primary studies. The primary studies use empirical research to explicitly define, improve, or evaluate requirements quality. We found that empirical research on requirements quality focuses on improvement techniques, with very few primary studies addressing evidence-based definitions and evaluations of quality attributes. Among the 12 quality attributes identified, the most prominent in the field are ambiguity, completeness, consistency, and correctness. We identified 111 sub-types of quality attributes such as “template conformance” for consistency or “passive voice” for ambiguity. Ambiguity has the largest share of these sub-types. The artefacts being studied are mostly referred to in the broadest sense as “requirements”, while little research targets quality attributes in specific types of requirements such as use cases or user stories. Our findings highlight the need to conduct more empirically grounded research defining requirements quality, using more varied research methods, and addressing a more diverse set of requirements types.

Highlights

  • Requirements engineering (RE) is “the process of defining, documenting, and maintaining requirements” [1], where “requirements” designate real-world goals for, functions of, and constraints on systems [2]

  • All aspects of requirements quality and artefact types are of interest to this systematic mapping study (SMS); no restrictions were made in the search string

  • We leave it to tertiary research to take our claims about requirements quality and look for similar patterns in the broader Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)—and potentially software engineering (SE)—communities. This SMS offers an overview of the field of empirical research on requirements quality

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Summary

Introduction

Requirements engineering (RE) is “the process of defining, documenting, and maintaining requirements” [1], where “requirements” designate real-world goals for, functions of, and constraints on systems [2]. Conducted an SMS that provides a generic overview of 67 studies, published between 1998 and 2013 [14] They showed that requirements ambiguity, completeness, and correctness are the most investigated problems in RE research. Heck and Zaidman conducted an SMS that covered eleven primary studies, published between 2001 and 2014, investigating state-of-the-art research into quality of specifications in the context of agile software development [15]. They showed that the main qualities of specifications to take into account are completeness, uniformity, consistency, and correctness. The practitioners’ literature (e.g. [30, 31]) proposed a set of quality criteria, the INVEST model [32], which is limited to user stories

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