Proposing a Systematic Approach to Verify Software Requirements

Abstract

Identifying stakeholder’s needs, eliciting, categorizing and translating them into specifications is the requirement analysis process. Requirement analysis can be a long and arduous process during which many delicate psychological skills are involved. For any software, it is important to identify all stakeholders, collect their requirements and ensure they understand the implications of the software. The gap between stakeholders’ vision of the proposed software and the analysis's depiction of that software is the cause of shortcomings in analysis. If the requirements specified by analysts can be tested against stakeholders' expectations, then this gap might be narrowed, and better solutions might be resulted. This paper discusses the impact of the activities of the analysis phase on the development process and on the software itself. It describes the development of the ReqVerifier tool and proposes a systematic approach on how to test software requirements and verify them against stakeholders’ vision in order to develop a good software requirement for a quality software.