An empirical study on the impact of automation on the requirements analysis process

Requirements analysis is an important phase in a software project. The analysis is often performed in an informal way by specialists who review documents looking for ambiguities, technical inconsistencies and incomplete parts. Automation is still far from being applied in requirements analyses, above all since natural languages are informal and thus difficult to treat automatically. There are only a few tools that can analyse texts. One of them, called QuARS, was developed by the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione and can analyse texts in terms of ambiguity. This paper describes how QuARS was used in a formal empirical experiment to assess the impact in terms of effectiveness and efficacy of the automation in the requirements review process of a software company.