Assessing the Quality of Software Requirements Specifications for Automotive Software Systems

As the size and complexity of automotive software increases, software requirements specification (SRS) is gaining importance in automotive software system development. However, the diversity in SRSs, which comes from the difference between product characteristics, is becoming an impediment for systematic inspection. We propose a two-stage inspection that combines first-stage inspection by third-party inspectors and second-stage inspection by the project team, which would allow SRSs written in different formats to be inspected in a uniform way. The scope of this paper is limited to third-party inspection. The proposed methodology leads to the following three benefits: 1) systematic inspection of SRSs from different product domains 2) analysis of the inspection results from multiple viewpoints 3) benchmark of inspection results and SRS quality. We applied the proposed method to two actual products' SRSs and evaluated the effect of the method.