Process Evaluation Based on Meeting Quality of Requirement Analysis Phase in Software Development Projects

We propose a metric for meeting quality in software development. Meeting is important in order to share knowledge and experience among developers and stakeholders. Most frequent and important meetings are in software requirement analysis phase. System engineers and stakeholders discuss software requirements. However, meeting quality is various. Sometimes, stakeholders feel vague decision and suspicious discussion. It is difficult to measure quantitatively the vagueness and suspicion because the vagueness and suspicion are based on human feeling. Therefore, to measure the vagueness and suspicion, our proposed metric is useful. A feature of the metric is to measure only when and who speaks in meetings, not depending on what was said. Hence, the metric does not require software domain knowledge and development experience. The metric consists of system engineers’ speaking time and the number of stakeholders’ speaking within one question by a system engineer. The metric is applied to a practical project. As a result, we automatically extract vague discussion and suspicious discussion in quantitative analysis using the metric. The number of extracted doubtful topic is 37 in all 69 topics. After that, we confirmed that the metric can predict doubtful topics that cause software faults in precision 59.5%, recall 84.5%. In addition, we found that a repeatable topic may cause software faults in requirement meetings.