Health Informatics System requirements dependency analysis as audit facilitator

INTRODUCTION / BACKGROUND: Audit requirements provide for software quality assurance and can be performed in different moments of its lifecycle. Functional and Non-Functional requirements relate each other at least once but in many cases at a higher rate, causing dependency and correlation effects that may increase the complexity of audit work. OBJECTIVES: Discuss methods to aid auditors for a better understanding of system requirements dependency and correlation. Provide for an audit test script proposition based on given requirement text set by automatic means. METHOD: Propose and test a semi-automated sequential process for requirements text analysis. Evaluate the requirements connection depth established using nonsemantical frequency-based data-mining approach. CONCLUSIONS: Requirements data-mining can help auditors to foresee cascading effects on audit checking, possibly reducing the need for repeated evidence gathering and the effort while planning and conducting complex assurance and compliance analysis on health informatics systems.