Goal-Oriented Software Design Reviews

Some software requirements are omitted or ambiguous depending on the design context, although these requirements would not necessarily be omitted or ambiguous when viewed as requirements alone. The design context sometimes causes inconsistencies among implementations that realize the same requirement. Existing detection and analysis methods do not limit evaluation of review materials to implementations of context-dependent design. An evaluation technique that limits the evaluated parts to the parts describing context-dependent design implementations is expected to be efficient. This paper proposes a method for detecting inconsistent implementations (context-dependent requirement defects) caused by context-dependent requirement omissions and ambiguities in design reviews. The proposed method defines goal-oriented check items for design review using a goal tree obtained by goal-oriented requirements analysis. Reviewers use the goal-oriented check items to detect inconsistent implementations that realize the same requirement. This paper also evaluates the proposed method through a case study. The results of the case study showed that the proposed method defined five goal-oriented check items and that reviewers detected 24 context-dependent requirement defects with goal-oriented check items. The results also showed that the sum of the estimated additional effort to define goal-oriented check items and perform design reviews with goal-oriented check items was 19.6 person-hours. Furthermore, the results showed that an engineer with general skills and knowledge of software development but without system-specific skills and knowledge could define a goal tree and the corresponding goal-oriented check items.