Structured SRS for e-Government Services With Boilerplate Design and Interface

Abstract

There are many projects being carried out to develop e-Government applications. In order to develop an efficient application, a proper requirements specification is strictly required. However, in the case of improper requirements specifications, errors are unavoidable for the developed applications. Therefore, it is necessary to use a model to determine the quality of software requirements. In the literature, several studies have been presented to propose a quality model for software requirements. Yet, there is no study on the development of a quality model for software requirements in Turkish language. Thus, the purpose of this study is to propose a quality assessment model of Software Requirements Specification (SRS) in Turkish language for e-Government applications. The proposed model aims at defining common texts and confirming that the sentences used in writing SRS are developed within an assured structure in order to minimize and standardize the errors originating from natural language. For this purpose, a model based on the Rupp’s boilerplate is created that allows the analyst or requirements engineer to accurately enter the requirements statements. In this study, an interface (webpage) is also created so that the model may match requirements with common text templates, compute similarity values, and also may insert the requirements, regulatory documents, and user requirements into the template in a more convenient format. In order to evaluate the proposed model, the sentences in the 32 documents, including 843 requirements, were adapted to the model. Then, the usability of the model was validated by the requirement engineers serving in a Government service. According to the results, it is concluded that the proposed model is applicable, and is able to improve the quality of SRS in Turkish language for e-Government applications.