Experimental and Simulation Analysis of Perspective Difference in Scenario-based Requirements Inspection

Abstract. Perspective-Based Reading (PBR) is a scenario-based inspection technique for quality assurance of requirements documents where several reviewers read a document from different perspectives (e.g. user, designer, tester). The reading is made according to a special scenario, specific for each perspective, where each perspective is expected to find different defects and a combination of several perspectives is assumed to detect more defects compared to the same amount of reading with a single perspective. This paper presents an empirical study of requirements inspection, which analyses the differences in the perspectives. The analysis results show that (1) there is no significant difference between the three perspectives in terms of defect detection rate and number of defects found per hour (2) there is no significant difference in the defect coverage of the three perspectives and (3) simulations confirm that relatively small differences between perspectives can be detected statistically. The results suggest that a combination of multiple perspectives may not give higher coverage of the defects compared to single-perspective reading. Further investigations are needed to understand the reasons to the failure of PBR in this experiment.