Improving requirements inspection through the use of a constructive reading inspection process

Defects introduced early in the requirements and design process are generally seen as a major factor leading to high costs, especially if undetected until later development phases. Software inspection methods have been particularly successful when applied to code inspections, but substantially less effective when applied to natural language requirements specifications. Improvements in requirements inspection methods can reasonably proceed from improvements in current methods and introduction of new methods.; This dissertation addresses the problem of improving requirements inspections by exploring foundational issues, such as the ability of inspectors, the degree that skill is present as a stable and determining factor, and whether defect detection is influenced by intrinsic differences in difficulty of detection among defects. Towards development of new inspection techniques, a Constructive Reading Inspection Process (CRIP) was developed and used to explore inspection seen as extracting the conceptual entities and their interrelationships as opposed to looking solely for defects.; The investigation was conducted in three experimental phases in which computer science graduate students from James Madison University inspected specifications drawn from the experimental literature. The experimental inspections explored both traditional reading methods and evolved CRIP methods. The results of these experiments included conclusions about traditional inspections methods, a defect classification method which allowed analysis of defect difficulty by category, and a relatively lightweight CRIP-II inspection process suitable for small scale projects and likely scalable to larger projects which uses a Subject-Process-Object-Relation (SPOR) model for transcribing requirements documents into a spreadsheet environment. Subsequent manipulations using spreadsheet operations, allow entities to be collected and assessed. A GRIP Graphical Notion (CGN) was used to develop compact diagram representations of the entities. CRIP is a fruitful inspection method either as adjunctive to traditional methods, or as a transition method between the requirements and the design process.