Requirements Content Goodness and Complexity Measurement Based on NP Chunks

In a typical software development project, a requirements document summarizes the results of the requirements analysis and becomes the basis for subsequent software development. In many cases, the quality of the requirements documents dictates the success of the software development. The need for determining the quality of requirements documents is particularly acute when the target applications are large, complicated, and mission critical. The purpose of this research is to develop quality indicators to indicate the quality of requirements statements in a requirements document. To achieve the goal, the goodness properties of the requirements statements are adopted to represent the quality of requirements statements. A suite of complexity metrics of requirements statements is proposed as the quality indicators and is developed based upon research of noun phrase (NP) chunks. A two phased empirical case study is performed to evaluate the usage of the proposed metrics.
The result of the evaluation indicates the proposed complexity metrics can be important tools to requirements engineers, project managers, and academic researchers interested in requirements quality and complexity.