Activity Diagram Inspection on Requirements Specification

The requirements specification of contemporary software applications usually is composed by diverse artifacts describing lots of activities, flows, dependencies among the flows, branches and business rules. For instance, web or scientific workflow (e-science) based applications require structural representations for the various activities and functionalities involved in their execution, usually described trough activity diagrams. The quality assurance of such specifications represents a challenge for software engineers. The results of a quasi-systematic review indicated there is a lack of software technologies to support the inspection of this type of requirements specification. Therefore, in this paper, besides the review results, an inspection technique (checklist) to review Activity Diagrams on the requirements specifications is introduced. A proof of concept on applying the checklist for the inspection of a real requirements specification concerned with a scientific workflow based application indicated some advantages on its defect detection capacity when compared with previously executed ad-hoc inspection by software engineers.