Spectrum analysis on quality requirements consideration in software design documents

• Published in: SpringerPlus Vol. 2; no. 1; p. 310
• Main Authors: Kaiya, Haruhiko, Umemura, Masahiro, Ogata, Shinpei, Kaijiri, Kenji
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 11.07.2013; Springer Nature B.V; BioMed Central Ltd
• Subjects: Computer Science; Humanities and Social Sciences; Knowledge based software engineering; multidisciplinary; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Software engineering; Requirements analysis; Quality requirements; Software design document; Traceability; Traceability; Requirements analysis; Quality requirements; Software design document; Software engineering
• ISSN: 2193-1801; 2193-1801
• DOI: 10.1186/2193-1801-2-310

Software quality requirements defined in the requirements analysis stage should be implemented in the final products, such as source codes and system deployment. To guarantee this meta-requirement, quality requirements should be considered in the intermediate stages, such as the design stage or the architectural definition stage. We propose a novel method for checking whether quality requirements are considered in the design stage. In this method, a technique called “spectrum analysis for quality requirements” is applied not only to requirements specifications but also to design documents. The technique enables us to derive the spectrum of a document, and quality requirements considerations in the document are numerically represented in the spectrum. We can thus objectively identify whether the considerations of quality requirements in a requirements document are adapted to its design document. To validate the method, we applied it to commercial software systems with the help of a supporting tool, and we confirmed that the method worked well.