Requirements Quality Assessment for Outsourcing

From the previous experience of various university projects and software development companies, it has been observed that poor quality of software requirements may result in failure of the project. This problem becomes more significant when the software projects are outsourced in order to reduce time to market and achieve cost cutting. Many outsourced projects have failed in the past due to the lack of high quality requirements or change in requirements that could not be reflected in software product. Certification of software requirements or software artifacts in general, offers organizations more certainty and confidence about software. If an organization wants certainty about or confidence in a software artifact it can request a LaQuSo certificate. In order to certify the software artifacts created during different stages of software development, LaQuSo has designed a product certification model called LSPCM. This model can be used to analyze software requirements, detect the defects and when they are solved, certify these requirements. The model has three major weaknesses. First is that it does not stress the issues involved in outsourcing that influence the quality of software requirements. Due to this fact it is not suitable for certifying software requirements of outsourcing projects. Secondly, the quality of the requirements cannot be measured objectively using LSPCM; for certification, the requirements must be analyzed by an experienced analyst. This means that LSPCM provides room for subjective interpretation. Thirdly, most of the conformance quality checks are performed manually in LSPCM, thus the amount of time required for quality assessment and certification is high. Along with these major weaknesses the model also has three minor weaknesses. First it does not give weight to availability of project-related documents in calculating the overall certification level. Secondly, it is not sensitive to IT domains. Thirdly, certification level is given based on the type of verification performed (e.g., manual, automatic) on the requirements document which is not very sensible in actual practice. These weaknesses need to be tackled in order to make LSPCM suitable for certifying software requirements of outsourcing projects. Identification of these weaknesses helps in determining the direction in which the model needs to be improved. This thesis proposes a flexible model (which can provide the core for a new version of LSPCM) which can be used for certifying software requirements of outsourcing projects. It also proposes a method for objective measurement of quality of the requirements, which means that the result of assessment will be more or less the same irrespective of the experience of the quality reviewer. The new model will be flexible in the sense that it can be easily adjusted to certify requirements for a particular IT/Business domain. Also this new model automates most of the quality checks which are done manually in LSPCM, thus reducing the time required for certification significantly. Unlike LSPCM, it takes into account the availability of project-related documents for calculating certification level.