Navigating your Configuration Window in QVscribe for Word

The QVscribe Configuration window contains five main tabs: Problem Types, Glossary, Unit Consistency, Exclusion Prefixes, and Templates.

Problem Types

The Problem Types tab consists of sixteen sub-sections, each representing a class of words/phrases corresponding to each key Problem Types used in the analysis and scoring of requirements.

In the Problem Types tab, each Problem Types sub-section consists of two lists of Problem Types: the list on the left which are the terms used during the QVscribe quality analysis to assess that Problem Types in the requirement; and the list on the right labeled Example Words showing the set of most common Problem Types to move to the QVscribe list by selecting it and pressing the arrow button below the list.

Note that the QVscribe list of Problem Types comes pre-populated with the Example Words, but this should generally be modified to meet your specific requirements standards.

Glossary

Glossary allows users to create a list of terms with definitions that promotes consistency within the team/organization this will help improve quality score of overall requirements. This provides the capability of showing acceptable terms in your QVscribe analysis to help reduce vagueness and improve communication between authors. By following a defined glossary, all users will have the exact meaning of a term, and improve clear language. This will also allow potential acronyms or terms that may infringe on rules in the configuration to be acceptable by the subject matter expert when present in the Glossary.

You can add, edit and remove terms in this list by pressing Add, Edit or Remove and entering the new details for the term.

Terms can also be imported via a .csv file by clicking on Import (.csv) terms can also be Exported by clicking Export All.

Unit Consistency

Measurement units are key to the specification of qualities in requirements. QVscribe scans through all marked requirements and detects any units within them based the user-configurable list accessible in the configuration window. This list maintains the unit name, unit type, and common abbreviations. Each unit can be enabled/disabled, edited, or removed.

You can also add and edit units in this list by pressing Add or Edit and entering the new details for the unit.

Selecting whether the unit is part of the International System of Units simply allows for filtering of units present in a document based on these SI or not.

Exclusion Prefixes

In requirements documents, there are often paragraphs relating to the main requirement specification that are meant as comments, rationales, or explanations meant to provide context to the related requirement but are written in open form and generally do not follow proper requirements best practices.

To address this, the Exclusions Prefixes tab helps by defining in QVscribe what term(s) is(are) used to define these context paragraphs so they are not included in the analysis of the actual requirement, and thus not skew the requirement's score. Note: the paragraph will need to begin with this prefix for QVscribe to relate it to the requirement.

Templates

Available to those who have QVscribe for Teams, QVscribe provides assistance to authors of requirements based on the Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS), with both EARS templates and a conformance check against these EARS templates.

Within the QVscribe configuration, you can choose to disable the QVscribe EARS conformance if this does not fit in with your business or the specific configuration.

This will automatically be checked as included and will be part of the QVscribe Quality Analysis details.