Document Quality Checking Tool for Global Software Development

Software development projects often utilize global resources to reduce costs. Typically a large volume of unstructured office documents are involved. Unfortunately, in many cases the low quality of unstructured documents due to various location-related barriers (e.g. time zones, languages, and cultures) can cause negative effects on the outcomes of projects. Several approaches have been introduced for document quality checking but they have not generalized well enough to handle various unstructured documents in a broad range of projects. Based on past experience, we have prepared guidelines, templates, rules, and document quality-checking tools for designing and developing global software development projects. In this paper we specifically focus on the effectiveness of our document quality checking tool. The challenges for such a checking tool are that it must be generally adaptive and also highly accurate to be practical for industrial use. Our approach is template-based and consists of an extraction process for the physical-syntactic structure, a transformation process for the logical-semantic structure and an analysis process. Our experiments inspected 66 authentic customer documents, detecting 118 errors. The accuracy as measured by the true-positive ratio (accurately detected true errors) was 98.3% and the true-negative ratio (accurately detected non-errors) was 99.4%.