earticle

영어

Requirements need to be validated at the early phase of the software development to avoid errors such as inconsistency, incompleteness and incorrectness. Drawn from this argument, a requirements validation process needs to consider Consistency, Completeness and Correctness (“3 Cs”) for the production of a quality software specifications. This paper provides a review of requirements validation and consistency management based on the existing literature in order to identify the gaps in the existing knowledge on the process of software requirements specifications. This paper begins with a review of the definitions of the 3Cs,upon which the understanding of the 3Cs is derived. Next comprehensive review of related works on the identified consistency management techniques: traceability and analysis approaches are then presented. This is supported with a heat map representations of the related research on the types of contributions, techniques, specifications and semantics used in consistency management. Since semi-formal specifications were found as the most common representation of the requirements, the types of models used as semi-formal specifications to represent the requirements were also discussed. Overall, this paper identifies the various gaps existing within the process of validating and managing the consistency of requirements to avoid re-inventing the wheels in the diverse and comprehensive knowledge of requirements engineering.