An investigation of how quality requirements are specified in industrial practice
Author
Summary, in English
Context: This paper analyses a sub-contractor specification in the mobile handset domain. Objective: The objective is to understand how quality requirements are specified and which types of requirements exist in a requirements specification from industry. Method: The case study is performed in the mobile handset domain, where a requirements specification was analyzed by categorizing and characterizing the pertaining requirements. Results: The requirements specification is written in structured natural language with unique identifiers for the requirements. Of the 2178 requirements, 827 (38%) are quality requirements. Of the quality requirements, 56% are quantified, i.e., having a direct metric in the requirement. The variation across the different sub-domains within the requirements specification is large. Conclusion: The findings from this study suggest that methods for quality requirements need to encompass many aspects to comprehensively support working with quality requirements. Solely focusing on, for example, quantification of quality requirements might overlook important requirements since there are many quality requirements in the studied specification where quantification is not appropriate. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Department/s
Publishing year
2013
Language
English
Pages
1224-1236
Publication/Series
Information and Software Technology
Volume
55
Issue
7
Full text
- Available as PDF - 745 kB
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Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Elsevier
Topic
- Computer Science
Keywords
- Quality requirements
- Case study
- Qualitative research
- Document
- analysis
- Metrics
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 0950-5849