Tailoring a COTS group support system for software requirements inspection

The inspection of early life-cycle artifacts such as requirement documents promises great benefits. However, research demonstrates that the inspection process is complex and expensive and that tool support would be highly desirable. Existing inspection tools focus largely on the inspection of source code. We have therefore devised groupware support for inspecting requirements. Based on our experience with adopting a group support system (GSS) for requirements negotiation, we decided to tailor this commercial GSS to support inspection of requirements. The paper discusses our concept of a Groupware-supported Requirements Inspection Process (GRIP) and shows that tailoring a COTS GSS works well to automate this process.