Application of human error theories in detecting and preventing software requirement errors

Developing correct software requirements is important for overall software quality. Most existing quality improvement approaches focus on detection and removal of faults (i.e., problems recorded in a document) as opposed to identifying the underlying errors that produced those faults. Accordingly, developers are likely to make the same errors in the future and not recognize other existing faults with the same origins. The Requirement Error Taxonomy (RET) developed by Walia and Carver helps focus the developer’s attention on common errors that can occur during requirements engineering. However, because development of software requirements is a human-centric process, requirements engineers will likely make human errors during the process which may lead to undetected faults. Thus, in order to bridge the gap, the goals of my dissertation are: (1) construct a complete Human Error Taxonomy (HET) for the software requirements stage; (2) investigate the usefulness of HET as a defect detection technique; (3) investigate the effectiveness of HET as a defect prevention technique; and (4) provide specific defect prevention measurements for each error in HET. To address these goals, the dissertation contains three articles. The first article is a systematic literature review that uses insights from cognitive psychology research on human errors to develop formal HET to help software engineers improve software requirements specification (SRS) documents. After building the HET, it is necessary to empirically evaluate its effectiveness. Thus, the second article describes two studies to evaluate the usefulness of the HET in the process of defect detection. Finally, the third article analyzes the usefulness of HET for defect prevention and provides strategies for preventing specific errors in the SRS.