Measuring the Quality of System Specifications in Use Case Driven Approaches

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges of a requirements analyst is to generate and provide a high-quality system specification in order to support other disciplines during system development. Today, there are only few mechanisms to measure the quality of requirements with less effort for the analyst. The following paper describes a meta-modeling and model-to-model transformation approach to formally evaluate different quality characteristics of system specifications like consistency and completeness in use case driven requirements analysis processes with less effort for the requirements analyst. Therefore, the mentioned concept integrates the information contained in different representations of requirements into a common requirements model and analyzes quality characteristics of the specification in two steps. In the first step, every representation within the specification will be evaluated separately according to predefined representation specific rules. In the second step after requirements integration, algorithms analyze the quality of the integrated information and calculate the overall characteristics of the specification.