SQ^(2)E: An Approach to Requirements Validation with Scenario Question

Abstract

Adequate requirements validation could prevent errors from propagating into later development phase, and eventually improve the quality of software systems. However, often validating textual requirements is difficult and error prone. We develop a feedback-based requirements validation methodology that provides an interactive and systematic way to validate a requirements model. Our approach is based on the notion of querying a model, which is built from a requirements specification, with scenario questions, in order to determine whether the model's behavior satisfies the given requirements. To investigate feasibility of our approach, we implemented a Scenario Question Query Engine (SQ2E), which uses scenario questions to query a model, and performed a preliminary case study using a real-world application. The results show that the approach we proposed was effective in detecting both expected and unexpected behaviors in a model. We believe that our approach could improve the quality of requirements and ultimately the quality of software systems.