Evaluation of Ontology-Based Checking of Software Requirements Specification

Knowledge-based software engineering, especially ontology-based method has potential to facilitate requirements engineering. However, the effect of ontology method depends on usage contexts and experiences of software engineers. This paper illustrates the evaluation of ontology-based checking method of requirements specification by two comparative experiments: in each experiment, two groups of subjects checked a same list of requirements but one group used ontology and the other group did not. The working method of two groups exchanged in the second experiment: the group using ontology in the first experiment worked freely in the second experiment and vice versa. In major cases in both experiments, the group using ontology had better results than the group working freely did. Through the experiments, the authors can show the effectiveness of the ontology in checking software requirements specification.