Understanding Ambiguity in Requirements Engineering

This chapter illustrates that ambiguity is a serious problem of natural language requirements documents, which is not limited to simple language problems such as multiple referents of an “it”. The results of two empirical studies are presented, which indicate that on one hand ambiguity problems are not solved by formalization during further software development activities, and, on the other hand, it is difficult to detect all ambiguities, even if the reader is aware of all the facets of ambiguity. A combination of the results of both studies indicated that most ambiguities that slip through formalization can be detected by a previous inspection using a tailored reading technique. Based on these results, recommendations are made on how to live with the inevitable ambiguity in the RE process.