Automated Tool for Software Requirements Inspection

Abstract

The software inspection process is a very cost effective method of identifying defects in documents produced during the software life cycle, leading to higher quality software with lower field failures. Manual inspections are labor intensive and dependent on human factors (e.g., preparation, moderation, and cooperation among development and quality assurance teams). An automated software inspection tool replaces a labor intensive manual approach of performing the inspection process. An automated inspection tool will offer greater efficiencies than any techniques involving manual inspections. Automation allows stakeholders (e.g., authors, inspectors) to closely work in coordination using the tool. Authors can host documents, view comments posted by inspectors, assign users and delete them. Inspectors can participate in the inspection process by validating against a set of guidelines and detect faults in a specific frame of time using different fault and error based inspection techniques. It is human to err, and as a result some of the faults may be overlooked. Hence, provisions are made for iterative inspection cycles to maximize the number of defects found and minimize the number of overlooked ones.