Automated Smell Detection and Recommendation in Natural Language Requirements

Requirement specifications are typically written in natural language (NL) due to its usability across multiple domains and understandability by all stakeholders. However, unstructured NL is prone to quality problems (e.g., ambiguity) in writing requirements, which can result in project failures. To address this issue, we present a tool, named Paska, that automatically detects quality problems as smells in NL requirements and offers recommendations to improve their quality. Our approach relies on natural language processing (NLP) techniques and, most importantly, a state-of-the-art controlled natural language (CNL) for requirements (Rimay), to detect smells and suggest recommendations using patterns defined in Rimay to improve requirement quality. We evaluated Paska through an industrial case study in the financial domain involving 13 systems and 2725 annotated requirements. The results show that our tool is accurate in detecting smells (precision of 89% and recall of 89%) and suggesting appropriate Rimay pattern recommendations (precision of 96% and recall of 94%).