Advances in software inspections
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
An experimental study of fault detection in user requirements documents
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Orthogonal Defect Classification-A Concept for In-Process Measurements
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering - Special issue on software measurement principles, techniques, and environments
In-Process Evaluation for Software Inspection and Test
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering - Special issue on software reliability
Automated consistency checking of requirements specifications
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
An experiment to assess different defect detection methods for software requirements inspections
ICSE '94 Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Software engineering
Supporting Scenario-Based Requirements Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A survey of software inspection checklists
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
Experimentation in software engineering: an introduction
Experimentation in software engineering: an introduction
Requirements engineering: a roadmap
Proceedings of the Conference on The Future of Software Engineering
Inference of message sequence charts
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering
A case study in root cause defect analysis
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering
Verification of embedded systems using a petri net based representation
ISSS '00 Proceedings of the 13th international symposium on System synthesis
Software Engineering Economics
Software Engineering Economics
Comparing Detection Methods for Software Requirements Inspections: A Replicated Experiment
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Experience with SCRAM, a SCenario Requirements Analysis Method
ICRE '98 Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Requirements Engineering: Putting Requirements Engineering to Practice
Dispatch Sequences for Embedded Control Models
RTAS '05 Proceedings of the 11th IEEE Real Time on Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium
Monitoring and control in scenario-based requirements analysis
Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering
Generating Annotated Behavior Models from End-User Scenarios
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Goal and scenario validation: a fluent combination
Requirements Engineering
Scenarios, goals, and state machines: a win-win partnership for model synthesis
Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
An Automated Tool for Generating UML Models from Natural Language Requirements
ASE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
Ontology and Model Alignment as a Means for Requirements Validation
ICSC '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Semantic Computing
On the joint use of i* with other modelling frameworks: A vision paper
RE '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE 19th International Requirements Engineering Conference
Requirements modelling by synthesis of deontic input-output automata
Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
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Context: Requirements engineering is one of the most important and critical phases in the software development life cycle, and should be carefully performed to build high quality and reliable software. However, requirements are typically gathered through various sources and are represented in natural language (NL), making requirements engineering a difficult, fault prone, and a challenging task. Objective: To ensure high-quality software, we need effective requirements verification methods that can clearly handle and address inherently ambiguous nature of NL specifications. The objective of this paper is to propose a method that can address the challenges with NL requirements verification and to evaluate our proposed method through controlled experiments. Method: We propose a model-based requirements verification method, called NLtoSTD, which transforms NL requirements into a State Transition Diagram (STD) that can help to detect and to eliminate ambiguities and incompleteness. The paper describes the NLtoSTD method to detect requirement faults, thereby improving the quality of the requirements. To evaluate the NLtoSTD method, we conducted two controlled experiments at North Dakota State University in which the participants employed the NLtoSTD method and a traditional fault checklist during the inspection of requirement documents to identify the ambiguities and incompleteness of the requirements. Results: Two experiment results show that the NLtoSTD method can be more effective in exposing the missing functionality and, in some cases, more ambiguous information than the fault-checklist method. Our experiments also revealed areas of improvement that benefit the method's applicability in the future. Conclusion: We presented a new approach, NLtoSTD, to verify requirements documents and two controlled experiments assessing our approach. The results are promising and have motivated the refinement of the NLtoSTD method and future empirical evaluation.