ADVANCING SOFTWARE ENGINEERING THROUGH SCENARIO-BASED REQUIREMENTS VALIDATION: A METRICS-DRIVEN APPROACH

Abstract

The total and the full traceability of the Software Requirements Specifications (SRS) has been an old issue in the field of software engineering and may lead to project postponement, cost escalation and system failure. Manual validation is less labour intensive, less consistent in projects, and more likely to contain errors compared to traditional validation techniques. The research is carried out in a formal metrics based framework of scenario based requirements validation which is supposed to provide a rigorous, reproducible and automated method of determining the quality of SRS. Six new quantitative measures in the form of Requirements-Scenarios Traceability Index (RSTI), Unlinked Requirements Percentage (URP), Scenario coverage Ratio (SCR), Scenario Completeness Score(SCS), Scenario similarity Index (SSI) and Scenario-Requirements Ratio (SRR) are proposed to quantitatively measure completeness and traceability. The similarity analysis of semantics and the hybrid validation systems are included in the framework too to ensure that coverage is maximized. The empirical results of 547 pairs of requirement-scenario, five industrial domains showed that there were significant enhancements and are the 96.7 percent accuracy of validation, the 84 percent less processing time and the 85 percent less validation cost. Stakeholder feedback also supported high usability and intent to adopt by supporting the claim that the effect would enable the possibility of the framework to convert requirements validation into an automated, scalable and reliable engineering process that previously represented a manual engineering process and was liable to error. The metrics-based solution resolves the possibility to contribute to the research community of software engineering and requirements engineering by the research article that is a contribution to the researcher community, which can be utilized to bridge the gap between the academic creativity and the practice in the industry.