Empirical validation of a software requirements specification checklist
Martin De Laat, Maya Daneva · University of Twente Research Information · 2018
[Context/Motivation] For areas such as Government IT Procurement, the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) often forms the basis for a public procurement. In these cases, having domain knowledge is often mutually exclusive to knowing RE. Domain experts lacking the necessary RE experience face issues assessing the quality and correctness of the SRS. This especially forms a problem for situations where the SRS acts as the base for a proposal and resulting contract, which is why often third party RE experts are consulted for evaluating the SRS beforehand. These experts are highly motivated to improve their process and offer a more uniform and better service. [Question/problem] Is our developed checklist a valid instrument to support the RE practitioner in the SRS validation process? [Principal ideas/results] We propose to empirically evaluate the checklist in a live study. Participants of our Evaluation Study are asked to simulate the validation of a sample SRS, guided by our checklist. We will analyze the data from a post-use questionnaire at the end of the session using a mixed method approach to assess the quality and usability of our checklist and its expected impact on the validation process. This assessment will be part of the overall validation of our checklist. [Expected Contribution] We expect to gain knowledge regarding the quality of our instrument. Secondly, this live study contributes to the validation, and thus the realization of a practical tool to be used by RE practitioners worldwide.