Research has repeatedly shown that high-quality requirements are essential for the success of development projects. While the term “quality” is pervasive in the field of requirements engineering and while the body of research on requirements quality is large, there is no meta-study of the field that overviews and compares the concrete quality attributes addressed by the community. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a systematic mapping study of the scientific literature. We retrieved 6905 articles from six academic databases, which we filtered down to 105 relevant primary studies. The primary studies use empirical research to explicitly define, improve, or evaluate requirements quality. We found that empirical research on requirements quality focuses on improvement techniques, with very few primary studies addressing evidence-based definitions and evaluations of quality attributes. Among the 12 quality attributes identified, the most prominent in the field are ambiguity, completeness, consistency, and correctness. We identified 111 sub-types of quality attributes such as “template conformance” for consistency or “passive voice” for ambiguity. Ambiguity has the largest share of these sub-types. The artefacts being studied are mostly referred to in the broadest sense as “requirements”, while little research targets quality attributes in specific types of requirements such as use cases or user stories. Our findings highlight the need to conduct more empirically grounded research defining requirements quality, using more varied research methods, and addressing a more diverse set of requirements types.

研究一再表明，高质量的需求对于开发项目的成功至关重要。虽然“质量”这个词在需求工程领域很普遍，而且需求质量的研究主体很大，但没有对该领域的元研究来概述和比较社区所解决的具体质量属性。为了填补这一知识空白，我们对科学文献进行了系统的绘图研究。我们从 6 个学术数据库中检索到 6905 篇文章，筛选到 105 项相关的主要研究。主要研究使用实证研究来明确定义、改进或评估需求质量。我们发现对需求质量的实证研究侧重于改进技术，很少有初步研究涉及基于证据的定义和质量属性评估。在确定的 12 个质量属性中，该领域最突出的是模糊性、完整性、一致性和正确性。我们确定了 111 种质量属性子类型，例如用于一致性的“模板一致性”或用于歧义的“被动语态”。歧义在这些子类型中所占份额最大。正在研究的人工制品大多在最广义上被称为“需求”，而很少有研究针对特定类型需求（例如用例或用户故事）中的质量属性。我们的发现强调需要进行更多基于经验的研究来定义需求质量，使用更多不同的研究方法，并解决更多样化的需求类型。