An Empirical Study on the Impact of Automation on the Requirements Analysis Process

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