An Automatic Tool for the Analysis of Natural Language Requirements

Using automatic tools for the quality analysis of Natural Language (NL) requirements is recognized as a key factor for achieving software quality. Unfortunately few tools and techniques for the NL requirements analysis are currently available. This paper presents a methodology and a tool (called QuARS - Quality Analyzer for Requirement Specifications) for analyzing NL requirements in a systematic and automatic way. QuARS allows requirements engineers to perform an initial parsing of the requirements in order to automatically detect potential linguistic defects that could cause interpretation problems at subsequent stages in developing the software. This tool is also able to partially support the consistency and completeness analysis by clustering the requirements according to specific topics.