Automatic Checking of Quality Best Practices in Software Development Documents

Quality assurance tasks of software products typically take place throughout the entire software development life-cycle. Frequently, paper-based inspections methods are used to review software development documents (e.g. requirements specifications, design documents, test plans). Nevertheless, even though the quality of these documents has a major impact on the quality of the developed software product, they are often not as rigorously reviewed as source code. This paper presents a tool-based approach that facilitates the software inspection process in order to determine defects of generally accepted documentation best practices in software development documents. Moreover, we present results of a conducted empirical study and show how this tool-based approach helps to facilitate inspection tasks and to support gathering information on the quality of the inspected documents.

I. INTRODUCTION

Software quality assurance aims at ensuring explicitly or implicitly defined quality goals for a software product. Assuring the quality of a software product basically deals with the fulfillment of specified functional and quality requirements, where the checks are often realized by static and dynamic testing of the software product. Software development documents like requirements specifications, which define how to build the right software product, or design documents, which define how to build the software product right, are also an essential part of the entire software product. However, they are often not treated with the same enthusiasm as source code [1] [2]. Consequently, documents usually left in a rather incomplete and unclear state. This can lead to design flaws that often appear in later phases of the development lifecycle associated with corresponding higher costs to fix them [3]. For instance, a cost/benefit-model reveals that due to the introduction of design inspection 44 percent of defect costs compared to testing alone can be saved [4]. Therefore, to positively influence the development of a software product, quality assurance also has to systematically deal with the quality of software development documents.