An empirical study on the relationship between defective requirements and test failures

The quality of software products depends on the quality of the requirements used to create them. Expressiveness (i.e., the ability to convey the intended meaning by avoiding ambiguities and readability problems) is an important quality characteristic of natural language requirements. This paper describes an empirical study that used data from an industrial software project to identify possible relationships between expressiveness defects in natural language requirements and failures during testing. The study shows that test failures occur more frequently when there exist requirements cases with expressiveness defects.