Text Mining for Standardized Quality Criteria of Natural-Language IT-Requirements

Abstract

Without a precise specification, an IT project might not remain on time and on budget constraints, or it might lead to a different outcome than desired. A number of established standards define how requirements must be written to avoid such issues. This paper describes our ongoing work to derive a comprehensive set of standardized criteria that IT-requirements must meet in accordance with IEEE 1233-1996 and ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148-2011. We also use a text-mining approach to identify IT-requirements that violate these standards. Our preliminary results are promising: In our biased dataset, we can use text features that are easy to compute, to filter out requirements that do not comply with the standards. Our beneficiaries are auditors, developers, Scrum teams, customers and other stakeholders whose projects are highly dependent on extensive IT-requirements specification.