A TOOL FOR DETECTING AMBIGUITY IN SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION

Abstract

The main goal of requirements engineering is to establish software requirements specification (SRS). The requirements in SRS are mostly specified in natural languages (NL), therefore, one of the common problems of SRS is requirements ambiguity. The requirement is said as ambiguouswhen it has more than one interpretation, subsequently, can lead torequirements inconsistency and conflict. Besides, to detect ambiguous requirements manuallyis time-consuming and tedious process. Thus, this paper presents a tool called SRS Ambiguity Detector,that able to detectautomatically the major types of ambiguity; lexical, syntactic and syntax ambiguity. This tool uses ambiguity words from the ambiguity handbook to detect lexical ambiguity, while, parts of speech (POS) tagging technique has been applied to detect syntactic and syntax ambiguities. Evaluation was conductedto assess the effectiveness, and the result has shown that the proposed tool able toidentify more ambiguous requirements as compared to manual detection.