Empirical Evaluation of Formal Method for Requirements Specification in Agile Approaches

Abstract

Agile approaches are known by making the use of informal elicitation techniques for requirements specification. The exclusive use of these techniques may cause some issues, such as ambiguous specifications and information lack. In this work we investigate better approaches to specify requirements in agile projects. Thus, we conducted an empirical evaluation about applicability of a formal method as specification technique, using mathematical logic as a possibility to solve limitations of informal specification. Initially, we conducted a survey to obtain the agile team practitioners opinion. Furthermore, we conducted two separated case studies in two agile teams to evaluate the applicability of Z notation in the requirements specification. Our initial results pointed out that formal specification assists on making complex requirements clearer and decreasing the time to understand their meanings.