Can GPT-4 Aid in Detecting Ambiguities, Inconsistencies, and Incompleteness in Requirements Analysis? A Comprehensive Case Study

Effective software projects hinge on robust requirements, yet flawed requirements often lead to costly delays and revisions. While tools have been developed to identify defects in Software Requirements Specifications (SRS), the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 presents new opportunities for enhancing requirements quality. However, the potential of LLMs in this realm remains largely unexplored, particularly in the context of large-scale industrial documents. To bridge this gap, we investigate the efficacy of zero-shot GPT-4 in various requirements analysis tasks using an industrial software specification document. Our study evaluates LLM performance in detecting defects, such as ambiguities, inconsistencies, and incompleteness, while also analyzing GPT-4’s ability to identify issues across version iterations and support technical experts in requirements analysis. Qualitatively, we identify key limitations of LLMs in defect detection, notably their inability to cross-reference throughout the document and their constrained understanding of specialized contexts. Quantitatively, we find that while LLMs excel in identifying incomplete requirements (precision 0.61), their performance is less impressive in detecting inconsistencies (precision 0.43) and ambiguities (precision 0.39). Although GPT-4 demonstrates promise in automating early defect detection across versions and providing accurate technical answers, our results underscore that they cannot entirely replace human analysts due to their lack of nuanced domain knowledge in a zero-shot setting. Nevertheless, avenues like few-shot learning and complex prompt design offer the potential to enhance LLM precision in defect detection.