On Understanding the Relation of Knowledge and Confidence to Requirements Quality

TL;DR

This study investigates how the combined lack of knowledge and confidence among software engineers negatively impacts requirements quality, emphasizing the importance of addressing both factors simultaneously.

Contribution

It reveals that deficiencies in both knowledge and confidence together have a greater negative effect on requirements quality than either factor alone.

Findings

Combined lack of knowledge and confidence worsens requirements quality

Low qualified requirements are linked to engineers' knowledge and confidence levels

Different needs for knowledge among engineers affect decision-making quality

Abstract

Context and Motivation: Software requirements are affected by the knowledge and confidence of software engineers. Analyzing the interrelated impact of these factors is difficult because of the challenges of assessing knowledge and confidence. Question/Problem: This research aims to draw attention to the need for considering the interrelated effects of confidence and knowledge on requirements quality, which has not been addressed by previous publications. Principal ideas/results: For this purpose, the following steps have been taken: 1) requirements quality was defined based on the instructions provided by the ISO29148:2011 standard, 2) we selected the symptoms of low qualified requirements based on ISO29148:2011, 3) we analyzed five Software Requirements Specification (SRS) documents to find these symptoms, 3) people who have prepared the documents were categorized in four classes to specify the more/less knowledge and confidence they have regarding the symptoms, and 4) finally, the relation of lack of enough knowledge and confidence to symptoms of low quality was investigated. The results revealed that the simultaneous deficiency of confidence and knowledge has more negative effects in comparison with a deficiency of knowledge or confidence. Contribution: In brief, this study has achieved these results: 1) the realization that a combined lack of knowledge and confidence has a larger effect on requirements quality than only one of the two factors, 2) the relation between low qualified requirements and requirements engineers' needs for knowledge and confidence, and 3) variety of requirements engineers' needs for knowledge based on their abilities to make discriminative and consistent decisions.