Automatic Checking of Quality Best Practices in Software Development Documents

Quality assurance tasks of software products typically take place throughout the entire software development life-cycle. Frequently, paper-based inspections methods are used to review software development documents (e.g. requirements specifications, design documents, test plans). Nevertheless, even though the quality of these documents has a major impact on the quality of the developed software product, they are often not as rigorously reviewed as source code. This paper presents a tool-based approach that facilitates the software inspection process in order to determine defects of generally accepted documentation best practices in software development documents. Moreover, we present results of a conducted empirical study and show how this tool-based approach helps to facilitate inspection tasks and to support gathering information on the quality of the inspected documents.