usingerrorabstractionandclassificationtoimprovethe.docVIP

Using Error Abstraction and Classification to Improve the Quality of Requirements: Conclusions from Family of Studies Abstract Achieving software quality is a primary concern for software development organizations. Researchers have developed many quality improvement methods that help developers detect faults early in the lifecycle. To address some of the limitations of fault-based quality improvement approaches, this paper describes an approach based on errors (i.e. the sources of the faults). This research extends Lanubile, et al.’s, error abstraction process by providing a formal requirement error taxonomy to help developers identify both faults and errors. The taxonomy was derived from the requirement errors found in the software engineering and psychology literature to help developers identify both errors and faults. This error abstraction and classification process is then validated through a family of empirical studies. The main conclusions derived from the four experiments are: (1) the error abstraction and classification process is an effective approach for identifying faults, (2) the requirement error taxonomy is useful addition for the error abstraction process, (3) deriving requirement errors from cognitive psychology research is beneficial. Keywords: Software Inspections; Error Abstraction; Software Engineering; Software Quality; Empirical Studies Introduction Ensuring the quality of software is a major goal for software engineers. As a result, researchers have developed many quality improvement approaches and evaluated them with controlled experiments and case studies in both laboratory and realistic settings (e.g., (Sakthivel, 1991; Chillarege, 1992; Florac, 1992; Chaar, 1993; Lawrence, 2004)). Researchers have devoted considerable effort to creating methods to help developers find and repair problems early in the lifecycle rather than late. It is estimated that 40-50% of the development effort is spent on avoidable rework, i.e. fixing problems