The Importance of Comprehension for Software Quality

The complete, accurate and concise documenting of requirements is of vital, perhaps paramount importance (Glass 1998) within software quality because errors made in this phase are often considered the most difficult to solve and most costly to fix (Bray 2002). Hence, the potential benefits of successful comprehension (Graesser et al. 1994) promise improvements in software quality, stakeholder satisfaction and development costs. However, comprehension is ‘a complex interaction of basic cognitive processes’ (Fletcher et al. 1996) which can be regarded as ‘one of the most complex and uniquely human of cognitive activities’ (Van Den Broek et al. 1996) and which are vital for developing computational thinking.

 

One area that offers a valid means of investigating comprehension is that of Discourse Process. Bamberg and Moissinac (2003) define discourse as ‘broadly taken to mean the use of language beyond that of a single sentence’. Discourse Process analyses the way in which sequences of sentences combine to produce coherent sections of language, and thus extends the traditional linguistic study of the construction of individual sentences (Crystal 1997; Graesser et al. 1997).

 

Requirements techniques aim to communicate sets of concepts and meanings which have been constructed, often within sizeable documents, to various stakeholders in a system. Moreover, they typically capture the interaction between an actor and the system in order to accomplish the actor’s goal across a number of statements (Cockburn 2001; Kulak and Guiney 2000). Therefore, discourse process is particularly relevant for the understanding, and improvement, of requirements.

 

References

1. Bray, I. K. (2002). An introduction to requirements engineering. Harlow: Addison-Wesley.
2. Cockburn, A. (2001). Writing effective use cases. London: Addison-Wesley.
3. Crystal, D. (1997). The Cambridge encyclopaedia of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. Fletcher, C. R., Van Den Broek, P., & Arthur, E. J. (1996). A model of narrative comprehension and recall. In B. K. Britton & A. C. Graesser (Eds.), Models of understanding text (pp. 141–163). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
5. Glass, R. (1998). Software runaways. Harlow: Prentice Hall.
6. Graesser, A. C., Singer, M., & Trabasso, T. (1994). Constructing inferences during narrative text comprehension. Psychological Review, 101(3), 371–395.
7. Kulak, D., & Guiney, E. (2000). Use cases: Requirements in context. London: ACM Press.
8. Van Den Broek, P., Risden, K., Fletcher, C. R., & Thurlow, R. (1996). A ‘‘landscape’’ view of reading: Fluctuating patterns of activation and the construction of a stable memory representation. In B. K. Britton & A. C. Graesser (Eds.), Models of understanding text (pp. 165–187). Mahwah, NJ: