Inspection effectiveness for different quality attributes of software requirement specifications: An industrial case study

Early inspections of software requirements specifications (SRS) are known to be an effective and cost-efficient quality assurance technique. However, inspections are often applied with the underlying assumption that they work equally well to assess all kinds of quality attributes of SRS. Little work has yet been done to validate this assumption. At Capgemini sd&m, we set up an inspection technique to assess SRS, the so called “specification quality gate” (QG-Spec). The QG-Spec has been applied to a series of large scale commercial projects. In this paper we present our lessons learned and discuss, which quality attributes are effectively assessed by means of the QG-Spec - and which are not. We argue that our results can be generalized to other existing inspection techniques. We came to the conclusion that inspections have to be carefully balanced with techniques for constructive quality assurance in order to economically arrive at high quality SRS.