Quality Evaluation of Software Requirements Specifications

The criticality of the Software Requirements Specifications (SRS) phase of the software life cycle for the success of the whole software project is widely recognized and the attention played on it by software developers is more and more significant. The software science developed in the past methods and techniques for producing quality SRS: structured languages, controlled languages, formal languages. Nevertheless the SRS phase is, especially in the Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) community, still one of the weakest steps of the whole software process. One of the principal reasons of this situation is that SMEs, stressed by the time-to-market, do not have enough resources for establishing rigorous methods for the SRS. Furthermore such rigorous methods should be shared among all the parties involved in a software project, customer included, asking for a further effort in terms of resources to be expended.