Scout

If you ever had quality defects in your requirements-suite or test-suite, you know how time-consuming and expensive they can become. However, due to the sheer size of requirements-suites and test-suites, assessing the quality of the contained artifacts is almost impossible. So, is there no way out of this mess, or do you have to stick deep in this yogurt? There is help: The automated requirements and test analysis tool Scout by Qualicen comes now in a new and improved version!

How we investigated whether our Qualicen Scout is a useful tool for companies in the domains of software and systems engineering.

Why we wanted to answer this question

As science showed, the quality of the requirements documentation influences the subsequent activities of the software engineering process. Detecting errors late in a software engineering process leads to very expensive changes of parts of every pre-executed activity. Accordingly, we at Qualicen help our customers to assure the quality of requirements specifications before they are used in other activities.

When we look at requirements documents that are new to us, we often need some help on terms and abbreviations. Creating a glossary to explain these imporant domain terms and abbreviations is a fine idea. It helps new team members to get going, improves the readability of a requirements specification and helps to avoid misunderstandings. The main problem with glossaries is that we create them once and update them only rarely. In consequence, the majority of glossaries are not particulary useful. In this article, Qualicen consultant Maximilian Junker shows how you can get more out of your glossary and keep it always up-to-date.