Measuring the Fitness-for-Purpose of Requirements: An initial Model of Activities and Attributes

TL;DR

This paper proposes an initial model to measure how requirements engineering activities and their attributes impact the overall fitness-for-purpose of requirements artifacts, aiming to improve software development support.

Contribution

It introduces a novel initial model of requirements-affected activities and attributes, constructed from literature and empirical data, to assess requirements quality.

Findings

Model includes 24 activities and 16 attributes

Constructed from literature and empirical data

Aims to support evidence-based decision making in RE

Abstract

Requirements engineering aims to fulfill a purpose, i.e., inform subsequent software development activities about stakeholders' needs and constraints that must be met by the system under development. The quality of requirements artifacts and processes is determined by how fit for this purpose they are, i.e., how they impact activities affected by them. However, research on requirements quality lacks a comprehensive overview of these activities and how to measure them. In this paper, we specify the research endeavor addressing this gap and propose an initial model of requirements-affected activities and their attributes. We construct a model from three distinct data sources, including both literature and empirical data. The results yield an initial model containing 24 activities and 16 attributes quantifying these activities. Our long-term goal is to develop evidence-based decision support on how to optimize the fitness for purpose of the RE phase to best support the subsequent, affected software development process. We do so by measuring the effect that requirements artifacts and processes have on the attributes of these activities. With the contribution at hand, we invite the research community to critically discuss our research roadmap and support the further evolution of the model.