Copyright © 2018 Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (2.14) (2018) 66-69 International Journal of Engineering & Technology Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET Research Paper Collaborative requirements review Azlin Nordin 1 , Nadzurah Zainal Abidin 2 , Sara Hanum Mohd Zaini 3 1 Department of Computer Science, Kulliyyah of Information and Communication Technology International Islamic University Malaysia 50728 Gombak, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia *Corresponding author E-mail : azlinnordin@iium.edu.my Abstract Requirements review is a formal review conducted to ensure that system requirements have been completely and clearly identified. In the conventional requirements review technique, reviewers are required to physically attend the review session and give their review feed- back during the session. In such a situation, there are potential problems of scheduling the review session based on the availability of the reviewers and issues with having to physically attend the entire review session. Furthermore, the review session needs to be manually organized by the review leader and the outcome of the session need to be manually compiled. In some occasions, more than one sessions are required to be organized. Hence, the objectives of this project are to: (1) create means for the reviewers to perform review anytime and anywhere; (2) facilitate collaborative review session; (3) support checklist management for the review guidance; and (4) allow com- pilation of the review feedback to be generated. As a case study, a web application for collaborative requirements review has been de- veloped and tested. Finally, the features of the application are tested and issues are documented. Keywords: : Requirements Review; Requirements Validation; Collaborative Review. 1. Introduction In general, Requirements Engineering (RE) is concerned with understanding domain knowledge and producing Software Re- quirements Specification (SRS) for the system to be built. RE normally consists of five main activities i.e. (1) elicitation, (2) analysis and negotiations, (3) documentation, (4) validation and (5) management or evolution [1]. Requirements review is per- formed in the requirement validation activity, which mostly con- cerned with checking the quality of the requirements document. In short, it is concerned with answering the question of ‘have we got the requirements right?’[2]. Based on IEEE Recommended Practice for Software Require- ments Specification (SRS) [3], a good SRS should be correct, unambiguous, complete, consistent, ranked, verifiable, modifiable and traceable. In addition to that, a mapping study on empirical evaluation of SRS indicated that among the 31 aspects being in- vestigated, the top-six most studied aspects are understandability, efficiency, correctness, defect rate, completeness and consistency [4]. Based on IEEE Standard for Software Review and Audit [5], there are five types of software reviews i.e. management review, tech- nical review, walkthrough, inspection and audit. These reviews can be performed in any stage of the software development life cycle (e.g. requirements, design, implementation, testing) or for any software work products (e.g. requirements specification, de- sign models, coding, test cases). Requirements review can be con- sidered as technical review technique where a group of stakehold- ers check the requirements document. According to Sulehri [6], requirements review is the most widely used as a requirement validation technique. There are three types of reviewing process i.e. 1) free mode, where there is no specific directive on how to perform the review, basi- cally based on reviewer’s initiatives and expertise; 2) checklist- based, where the review process is done based on a predefined list of criteria as a guidance; and 3) process-based, where reviewers are expected to find defects based on different perspectives [7]. In general, the requirements review process can be summarized and visualized as shown in Figure 1 [2]. During the initial step, the review leader plans for the review by selecting the review team members, setting the time and venue. Next stage is followed by distributing documents, where requirements document and any relevant documents are distributed to the review team members. During the preparation for the review process, each reviewer is normally expected to inspect the requirements document to identi- fy conflicts, omissions, inconsistencies, deviations from standards Fig. 1: Requirements review process