Reducing textual ambiguity risk in high-impact standards.

Biscoglio I, Fusani M

Standard  Error  Fault  Failure  Glossary  Safety  D.2.1 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING. Requirements/Specifications 

Safety-related standards indirectly impact into people's safety and environment integrity. The quality of these standards plays an important role in their correct and productive adoption. The paper is concerned with the analysis of the way standards are written, and in particular with the results of an automated textual inspection of five safety-related standards, aimed to discover possible inherent ambiguity of textual expressions. The analysis suggested that useful advice could be given to standard-making committees. Results of the analysis are shown and discussed.