Rapid quality assurance with Requirements Smells

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight static analysis method called Requirements Smells, adapted from code smells, to quickly identify potential quality issues in requirements documents, thereby improving early defect detection.

Contribution

It proposes the concept of Requirements Smells, implements a prototype for detection, and evaluates its effectiveness in industrial and academic settings.

Findings

Automatic detection achieves 59% precision and 82% recall

Smell detection increases awareness of requirements quality defects

Some smells are not clearly distinguishable, indicating need for refinement

Abstract

Bad requirements quality can cause expensive consequences during the software development lifecycle, especially if iterations are long and feedback comes late. %-- the faster a problem is found, the cheaper it is to fix. This makes explicit the need of a lightweight detection mechanism of requirements quality violations. We aim at a light-weight static requirements analysis approach that allows for rapid checks immediately when requirements are written down. We transfer the concept of code smells to Requirements Engineering as Requirements Smells. To evaluate the benefits and limitations, we define Requirements Smells, realize our concepts for a smell detection in a prototype called Smella and apply Smella in a series of cases provided by three industrial and a university context. The automatic detection yields an average precision of 59% at an average recall of 82% with high variation. The evaluation in practical environments indicates benefits such as an increase of the awareness of quality defects. Yet, some smells were not clearly distinguishable. Lightweight smell detection can uncover many practically relevant requirements defects in a reasonably precise way. Although some smells need to be defined more clearly, smell detection provides a helpful means to support quality assurance in Requirements Engineering, for instance, as a supplement to reviews.