Software Engineering Institute

Numerous tools and techniques are available for managing requirements. Many are designed to define requirements, provide configuration management, and control distribution. However, there are few automatic tools to support the quality analysis of natural language (NL) requirements. Ambiguity analysis and consistency and completeness verification are usually carried out by human reviewers who read requirements documents and look for defects. This clerical activity is boring, time consuming, and often ineffective. 

This report describes a disciplined method and a related automated tool that can be used for the analysis of NL requirements documents. The tool, called the Quality Analyzer for Requirements Specifications (QuARS), makes it easier to extract structured information and metrics for detecting linguistic inaccuracies and defects. 

QuARS allows requirements engineers to perform an initial parsing of requirements by automatically detecting potential linguistic defects that can cause ambiguity problems at later stages of software product development. The tool also provides support for the consistency and completeness analysis of the requirements.