| In a typical software development project, a requirements document summarizes the results of the requirements analysis and becomes the basis of the subsequent software development. In many cases, the quality of the requirements documents dictates the success of the software applications. The need for determining the quality of requirements documents is particularly acute when the target applications are large, complicated, and mission critical. The research question for this dissertation is as follows: is there a way to identify the low quality requirements statements in a requirements document? To answer this question, the goodness properties of the requirements statements are adopted to represent the quality of the requirements statements. A suite of complexity metrics of requirements statements is proposed as the quality indicators, and the suite of complexity metrics is developed based upon noun phrase (NP) chunks researched. A two phased empirical case study using several requirements documents is performed to evaluate the usage of the proposed metrics. By focusing upon the complexity metrics based on NP chunks, the research aided in the complexity indicators of low quality requirements documents. |
