A Case Study on Specifying Quality Requirements Using a Quality Model

Abstract

Quality requirements are an often neglected part of requirements engineering. If specified at all, they tend to be either too abstract or very technical and without a rationale. In this paper, we evaluate a quality requirements approach, which makes use of activity-based quality models. To this end, we conduct a comparative case study at Siemens in which we compare the requirements resulting from applying our quality model with the requirements previously used in the same environment. The results indicate an improvement of the requirements regarding, e.g., structured ness and trace ability, but also that the productivity perceived by the industry participants could not be increased. The study thus gives first insights into strengths and limitations of using a quality model in an industrial requirements engineering process.