A framework for evaluating and improving requirements specifications based on the developers and testers perspective.

Requirements specifications are essential to properly communicate requirements among the software development team members. However, each role in the team has different informational needs in order to perform their activities. Thus, the requirements engineer should provide the necessary information to meet each team member's necessities to reduce errors in software development due to inadequate or insufficient communication. Although some research is concerned with communicating requirements among clients and analysts, no related research has been found to evaluate and improve requirements communication within the software development team. With this in mind, we present the ReComP framework, which assists in the identification of problems in the artifacts used to communicate requirements, identification of informational requirements for each role of the development team, and provide improvement suggestions to address requirements communication problems. ReComP was developed using the Design Science Research (DSR) method and this paper presents the results of two DSR cycles considering the use of ReComP for the developer and tester roles by using, respectively, user stories and use cases as requirements specifications. The results provide evidence that ReComP helps software development teams to identify and improve issues in the requirements specifications used for project communication. In two independent studies, ReComP was able to decrease the frequency of problems by 77% in user stories identified by developers and the frequency of all (100%) problems in use cases identified by testers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]