Applying Testing to Requirements Inspection for Software Quality Assurance

eveloping software systems involves a series of activities where there are many opportunities to make errors. Such errors may occur at an early stage of the development process where user requirements are incorrectly or incompletely specified, and also in subsequent stages when design and programming faults are introduced. Thus, software development should always be accompanied by quality assurance (QA) activities. Two common QA activities are requirements inspection and software testing (otherwise simply known as testing), which are often used in different phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC) 14 . Traditionally, requirements inspection is performed at an early stage of SDLC to reveal defects in a requirements specification (thereafter simply referred to as a specification). On the other hand, testing is commonly done at a later stage of SDLC to look for program faults after coding. Because their purposes are different, requirements inspection and testing are often treated as “separate” and “unrelated” tasks by software practitioners. In recent years, many researchers have proposed to apply testing techniques to requirements