Learning to Write Better Requirements through Heuristic Critiques

Writing good requirements is difficult. Authors of requirements specifications need to acquire specific habits and professional writing styles to avoid ambigu-ities. However, gaining and sharing related experience and abilities is challenging. Heuristic Critiques offer help in this situation. Experience on writing good re-quirements can be codified as heuristic critiques. When integrated in a requirements tool, a heuristic critique can automatically check requirements specifications and provide constructive feedback (critique), whenever a piece of experience is applicable. Observing this feedback helps requirements authors to transfer expe-rience in writing, and internalize it. In this paper we describe the concept of learning to write better re-quirements through heuristic critiques - both, on an individual level and on an organizational level. The proposed concept has been applied in several dedicat-ed requirements support tools; it can also be used to improve existing tools and methods.