Critiquing Rules and Quality Quantification of Development-Related Documents

As the development of embedded systems grows in scale, it is becoming more important for engineers to share development documents such as requirements, design specifications and testing specifications, and to accurately circulate and understand the information necessary for development. Also, many defects that can be originated in the surface expression of the documents are reported through investigations of causes of defects in embedded systems development, In this paper, we highlight improper surface expressions of Japanese documents, and define quality criteria and critiquing rules to detect problems such as ambiguous expressions or omissions of information. We also carry out visual quality inspections and evaluate detection performance, correlations and working time. Then, we verify the validity of the critiquing rules we have defined and apply them to the document critiquing tool to evaluate the quality of the actual documents used in the development of embedded systems. And we quantify the quality of these documents by automatically detecting improper expression. We also apply supplemental critiquing rules to the document critiquing tool for use by non-native speakers of Japanese, and verify its efficacy at improving the quality of Japanese documents created by foreigners.