The linguistic approach to the natural language requirements quality: benefit of the use of an automatic tool

Natural Language (NL) requirements are widely used in software industry, at least as the first level of description of a system. Unfortunately they are often prone to errors and this is partially caused by interpretation problems due to the use of NL itself. This paper presents a methodology for the analysis of natural language requirements based on a quality model addressing a relevant part of the interpretation problems that can be approached at linguistic level. To provide an automatic support to this methodology a tool called QuARS (Quality Analyzer of Requirement Specification) has been implemented. The methodology and the underlying quality model have been validated by analyzing with QuARS several industrial software NL requirement documents showing interesting results.