Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

SpecQua: Towards a Framework for Requirements Specifications with Increased Quality

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 227))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Requirements specifications describe multiple technical concerns of a system and are used throughout the project life-cycle to help sharing a system’s common understanding among multiple stakeholders. The interest to support the definition and the management of system requirements specifications (SRSs) is evident by the diversity of many generic and RE-specific tools. However, little work has been done in what concerns the quality of SRSs. Indeed, most recommended practices are mainly focused on human-intensive tasks, mainly dependent on domain experts, and so, these practices tend to be time-consuming, error-prone and unproductive. This paper proposes and discusses an innovative approach to mitigate this status, and defends that with proper tool support – such as the SpecQua framework discussed in the paper –, we can increase the overall quality of SRSs as well as we can increase the productivity associated to traditional tasks of RE such as documentation and validation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Pohl, K.: Requirements Engineering Fundamentals, Principles, and Techniques, 1st edn. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Sommerville, I., Sawyer, P.: Requirements Engineering: A Good Practice Guide. Wiley, New York (1997)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Robertson, S., Robertson, J.: Mastering the Requirements Process, 2nd edn. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Emam, K., Koru, A.: A replicated survey of IT software project failures. IEEE Softw. 25(5), 84–90 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Davis, A.M.: Just Enough Requirements Management: Where Software Development Meets Marketing, 1st edn. Dorset House Publishing, New York (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Kovitz, B.: Practical Software Requirements: Manual of Content and Style. Manning, Greenwich (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  7. IEEE Computer Society, 1998. IEEE Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specifications. IEEE Std 830-1998

    Google Scholar 

  8. Bird, S., Klein, E., Loper, E.: Natural Language Processing with Python. O’Reilly Media, Sebastapol (2009)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  9. Ferreira, D., Silva, A.R.: RSLingo: an information extraction approach toward formal requirements specifications. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Int. Workshop on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering (MoDRE 2012), IEEE CS (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Ferreira, D., Silva, A.R.: RSL-IL: An interlingua for formally documenting requirements. In: Proceedings of the of Third IEEE International Workshop on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering (MoDRE 2013), IEEE CS (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Ferreira, D., Silva, A.R.: RSL-PL: A linguistic pattern language for documenting software requirements. In: Proceedings of the of Third International Workshop on Requirements Patterns (RePa 2013), IEEE CS (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Silva, A.R.: Quality of requirements specifications: a framework for automatic validation of requirements In: Proceedings of ICEIS 2014 Conference, 2014, SCITEPRESS (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Silva, A.R., et al.: Towards a system requirements specification template that minimizes combinatorial effects. In: Proceedings of QUATIC 2014 Conference, IEEE CS (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Hooks I.: Writing good requirements. In: Proceedings of the Third International Symposium of the INCOSE, vol. 2 (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Kamsties, E., Berry, D.M., Paech, B.: Detecting ambiguities in requirements documents using inspections. In: Proceedings of the First Workshop on Inspection in Software Engineering (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  16. van Lamsweerde, A.: From Worlds to Machines. In: Nuseibeh, B., Zave, P. (eds.) A Tribute to Michael Jackson. Lulu Press (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Foster, H., Krolnik, A., Lacey, D.: Assertion-based Design. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Young, R., 2003. The Requirements Engineering Handbook. Artech Print on Demand

    Google Scholar 

  19. Fuchs, N.E., Kaljurand, K., Kuhn, T.: Attempto controlled english for knowledge representation. In: Baroglio, C., Bonatti, P.A., Małuszyński, J., Marchiori, M., Polleres, A., Schaffert, S. (eds.) Reasoning Web. LNCS, vol. 5224, pp. 104–124. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  20. Kuhn, T.: Controlled English for Knowledge Representation. Ph.D. thesis, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology of the University of Zurich (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Cunningham, H.: Information extraction, automatic. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edn. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Ferreira, D., Silva, A.R.: Wiki supported collaborative requirements engineering. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Wikis. ACM (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Moreira, R., Paiva, A.C.R., Memon, A.: A pattern-based approach for GUI modeling and testing. In: IEEE 24th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), IEEE CS (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Silva, A.R., et al.: Integration of RE and MDE paradigms: the ProjectIT approach and tools. IET Softw. J. 1(6), 294–314 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Savic, D., et al.: Use case specification at different levels of abstraction. In: Proceedings of QUATIC 2012 Conference, 2012, IEEE CS (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Ribeiro, A., Silva, A.R.: XIS-Mobile: a DSL for mobile applications. In: Proceedings of SAC 2014 Conference, ACM (2014)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, under the project PEst-OE/EEI/LA0021/2013 and DataStorm Research Line of Excellency funding (EXCL/EEI-ESS/0257/2012). Particular thanks to my students David Ferreira and Joao Marques for their strong participation and involvement in this research.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa and INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal

    Alberto Rodrigues da Silva

Authors
  1. Alberto Rodrigues da Silva
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alberto Rodrigues da Silva .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. INSTICC, Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, Setúbal, Portugal

    José Cordeiro

  2. MODESTE/ESEO, Angers, France

    Slimane Hammoudi

  3. Wroclaw University of Economics, Wroclaw, Poland

    Leszek Maciaszek

  4. MODESTE/ESEO, Angers, France

    Olivier Camp

  5. INSTICC, Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, Setúbal, Portugal

    Joaquim Filipe

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

da Silva, A.R. (2015). SpecQua: Towards a Framework for Requirements Specifications with Increased Quality. In: Cordeiro, J., Hammoudi, S., Maciaszek, L., Camp, O., Filipe, J. (eds) Enterprise Information Systems. ICEIS 2014. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 227. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22348-3_15

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22348-3_15

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22347-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22348-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation