Quality assessment method for software development process document based on software document characteristics metric

Abstract

To deliver the software product which conforms to customer's actual needs has become an important issue of software development companies. The appropriate Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) which is the process consists of a sequence of activities performed for developing that software product is selected. During those activities, there are various information related to software product development and are used to communicate among parties involved. This information is often specified in SDLC documents using natural language. Unfortunately, the problems of interpretation and difficulty of understanding are arisen and often caused by characteristic of natural language itself, which is ambiguous, and the inappropriateness of document structure. These problems which are some of the interested open questions in software requirements specifications area may influence on software product discrepancy from customer's actual needs. To mitigate these problems, this paper proposes a method for assessing quality of SDLC documents characteristics focusing on document contents and structure. The measurement process model is used as a guideline for proposing the method and the measurement information model is applied to define metrics which are used to assess SDLC documents characteristics directly. A Software Requirements Specifications (SRS) document was used to illustrate our proposed method as a case study. The result of the proposed method can be used to indicate the quality level of SDLC documents and appeared flaws, which leads to the improvement of SDLC document quality. The improved SDLC documents can enhance the quality of communication among stakeholders and support the software product development to meet customer's actual needs. These results can also be stored as a lesson learned and be applied for the future similar situation.