A linguistic approach to quality evaluation of checklists

Software Quality evaluation process relies on the use of checklists, to exarnine both produci and process measurements. Although crucial components of the evaluation process, checklists - being natural language expressions - tend io be ambiguous, incomplete and underspecified. lt seems therefore convenient to introduce a quality model, defined in terms of linguistic requirements, for this instrument. In this paper the results are presented of a research activity directed at defining methodologies and tools to verify checklists against such requirements. In order to mechanise some stages of the analysis process, a technique has been developed according to Natural Language Understanding principles using a grammar to parse the checklist's entries and analyse them on the basis of the qualiry model. Results from experirnents carried out on published checklists are presented and discussed.