Scouting Requirements Quality Using Visual Representations

Examining the quality of a set of requirements is a sensible project health check given their role in the engineering of quality software systems. However, not all project stakeholders may recognize the value of requirements audits or inspections, and scrutinizing the details of a requirements document can be perceived to be too time-consuming, distracting and costly an activity to undertake early on in a project. We suggest that a major benefit of any such review activity is the discussion that is triggered amongst stakeholders about the artifact under consideration, in this case the requirements document, and that more cursory approaches may yield some of this value and be more appealing so as to encourage this actual practice. In particular, we propose that a visualization of an emerging requirements document could be generated as a vehicle for preliminary review, in advance of more concerted efforts directed towards finding defects in the predominantly text-based artifact itself. We call this initial review activity dasiascoutingpsila, provide heuristics to support it and evaluate the potential of Wordles as a candidate visual representation. This work hence proposes applying a pre-existing visualization technique to an important problem area in software engineering.