Automated Quality Defect Detection in Software Development Documents

Quality of software products typically has to be assured throughout the entire software development life-cycle. However, software development documents (e.g. requirements specifications, design documents, test plans) are often not as rigorously reviewed as source code, although their quality has a major impact on the quality of the evolving software product. Due to the narrative nature of these documents, more formal approaches beyond software inspections are difficult to establish. This paper presents a tool-based approach that supports the software inspection process in order to determine defects of generally accepted documentation best practices in software development documents. By means of an empirical study we show, how this tool-based approach helps accelerating inspection tasks and facilitates gathering information on the quality of the inspected documents.