Abstract
In the late 1990s the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Software Assurance Technology Center (SATC) developed a tool to automatically analyze a requirements document and produce a detailed quality report. The report was based on statistical analysis of word frequencies at various structural levels of the document. The Automated Requirements Measurement (ARM) tool was further enhanced to include additional functionality such as custom definitions of quality indicators inputs for document analysis. By 2011 work on the ARM tool was discontinued. This paper describes the reverse-engineering and reproduction of the functionality of ARM. Recreating the functionality of this tool yielded valuable insight into certain quality metrics and provides a benchmark tool for future research. In addition to recreating and working with the ARM tool, this paper explores both existing and potential definitions of quality metrics in requirements specifications. Automated requirements analysis is a convergence of various fields of research, including text mining, quality analysis, and natural language processing. Informed by tangential areas of research in document understanding and data mining, recommendations are made for future areas of research and development in automated requirements analysis.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Manoj Keswani and Eric Li of Transport for New South Wales, Australia, for various discussions related to their use of the ARM Tools over the years and for experimenting with the reconstructed tool and providing feedback, and to Christopher Laplante for various discussions and prototyping related to the reconstructed tool.
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Carlson, N., Laplante, P. The NASA automated requirements measurement tool: a reconstruction. Innovations Syst Softw Eng 10, 77–91 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-013-0225-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-013-0225-8