A metamodel for design review derived from design specification templates

In order to improve the quality of software, we review specifications refined from the specifications of the previous design process. Nevertheless, errors and defects of specifications are sometimes detected during testing processes. According to our research, we've found that the internal design specifications have more defects than other specifications. Most of those defects were embedded during the refining process from the external design to the internal design. The aim of our research is to detect those defects by reviewing the internal design specifications. One of the difficulties of reviews is that reviewers trace an item in the external design specifications to an item in the internal design specifications. In order to solve the difficulties, we defined two metamodels and a relationship model between those specifications by analyzing the templates of design specifications. The metamodels represent the structure with items of external design specifications and internal design specifications. The relationship model represents dependency between items in an external design specification and an internal design specification. The metamodels and the relationship model were evaluated by review checklists. This paper shows those models and the result of our evaluation. We conclude that the review checklist derived from the models can list up review perspectives more effectively than conventional checklists.