Mean dependency length – a new metric for requirements quality

Leonardo M. Barbosa, Igor C. A. Oliveira (Instituto Militar de Engenharia (Military Institute of Engineering))
Christopher S. Cerqueira (Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (Aeronautics Institute of Technology))
Antonio E. C. Cunha (Instituto Militar de Engenharia (Military Institute of Engineering))

Keywords

Requirements quality metrics;Natural language requirements;Dependency grammar

Abstract

According to the authors, a linguistic feature based on dependency grammar, called mean dependency length (MDL), can be used as a metric to measure the quality of natural language requirements. They conducted statistical tests on over 1700 sentences, taken from 249 requirements that were rewritten using five different patterns. The results indicated that MDL is responsive to the application of pattern rules, aligned with users' values, and it can be automatically quantified.