Can clone detection support quality assessments of requirements specifications?

  • Authors:

  • Elmar Juergens;Florian Deissenboeck;Martin Feilkas;Benjamin Hummel;Bernhard Schaetz;Stefan Wagner;Christoph Domann;Jonathan Streit

  • Affiliations:

  • Technische Universität München, Garching b. München, Germany;Technische Universität München, Garching b. München, Germany;Technische Universität München, Garching b. München, Germany;Technische Universität München, Garching b. München, Germany;Technische Universität München, Garching b. München, Germany;Technische Universität München, Garching b. München, Germany;itestra GmbH, Garching b. München, Germany;itestra GmbH, Garching b. München, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2010

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Due to their pivotal role in software engineering, considerable effort is spent on the quality assurance of software requirements specifications. As they are mainly described in natural language, relatively few means of automated quality assessment exist. However, we found that clone detection, a technique widely applied to source code, is promising to assess one important quality aspect in an automated way, namely redundancy that stems from copy&paste operations. This paper describes a large-scale case study that applied clone detection to 28 requirements specifications with a total of 8,667 pages. We report on the amount of redundancy found in real-world specifications, discuss its nature as well as its consequences and evaluate in how far existing code clone detection approaches can be applied to assess the quality of requirements specifications in practice.