Groupware Support for Software Requirements Inspection

The inspection of software products has proven to be an effective approach to find defects. Inspecting requirements documents offers especially large benefits as it removes defects very early in the development process. On the other hand inspection is also an expensive and sometimes cumbersome process resulting in a large amount of inspection material that has to be sorted, searched, and consolidated. Existing inspection tools whose success has been empirically evaluated are focused on code inspection and fall short for inspection needs of early life cycle documents like requirements specifications. Based (a) on empirical data from our experiments with paperbased inspection of requirements documents and (b) on our experience with groupware support for software requirements negotiation, we have developed a concept for a groupwaresupported requirements inspection process. In this paper we present our concept, discuss potential benefits for software requirements inspection, and propose an approach for empirical evaluation.