What do the analyser codes mean?
When you analyse a requirement or a story in REQQA, you choose one or more analysers to run. Each analyser examines your text through a single lens — terminology, business rules, boundaries, ambiguity, and so on — and records the issues it finds. Every analyser has a short code, and you'll see those codes throughout the application: on the analysis configuration screen, in the analysis history, and in the stepCode recorded against each run.
The codes follow a simple pattern. The letter before the hyphen tells you what kind of artefact the analyser works on:
- R- analysers run against requirements.
- D- analysers run against stories (Gherkin). The seven story-analyser letters spell out DeFOSPAM — the analysis technique REQQA is built on.
The letter after the hyphen identifies the specific lens. The tables below list every analyser currently available, taken directly from REQQA's analyser registry.
Requirement analysers (R-)
These run against a requirement's text. A typical full requirement analysis runs most or all of them in sequence, starting with R-D (which feeds the glossary) and ending with R-M (a final completeness sweep).
| Code | Name | What it checks |
|---|---|---|
| R-D | Requirement Definitions | Extracts terminology from the requirement text to build the glossary. |
| R-G | Goals, Context and Users | Assesses business rationale, user roles, scope, and traceability. |
| R-F | Requirement Features | Identifies implementable features from the requirement text. |
| R-I | Interfaces | Identifies and assesses all interfaces implied or required. |
| R-R | Rules | Extracts and evaluates all business rules, constraints, and calculations. |
| R-E | Entities and Data | Identifies data entities, attributes, relationships, and lifecycle. |
| R-C | Conditions and Decisions | Maps all conditional logic and assesses branch completeness. |
| R-B | Boundaries | Assesses precision and completeness at edge cases and extreme values. |
| R-Q | Quality Attributes | Identifies and assesses non-functional obligations and compliance needs. |
| R-A | Ambiguity | Detects vague language, contradictions, and implicit assumptions. |
| R-M | Missing Elements | Final completeness sweep across all analytical dimensions. |
Story analysers (D-) — DeFOSPAM
These run against a story's Gherkin scenarios. The seven letters — Definitions, Features, Outcomes, Scenarios, Prediction, Ambiguity, Missing — give the DeFOSPAM technique its name.
| Code | Name | What it checks |
|---|---|---|
| D-D | Definitions | Validates terminology and definitions. |
| D-F | Features | Analyses feature identification, granularity, and boundaries. |
| D-O | Outcomes | Analyses outcome completeness, observability, and consistency. |
| D-S | Scenarios | Analyses scenario coverage, boundaries, and missing test cases. |
| D-P | Prediction | Analyses scenario-outcome mapping and predictability. |
| D-A | Ambiguity | Analyses duplicate scenarios, conflicts, and inconsistencies. |
| D-M | Missing | Comprehensive final check for missing elements. |
Why a single analysis shows several codes joined together
A single analysis run almost always uses more than one analyser. REQQA records the set you chose as one comma-separated value in the stepCode field — for example R-D,R-G,R-F,R-I,R-R,R-A,R-M. It is not one row per analyser; it's one analysis run that fired several lenses, listed in the order they ran.
If you're reading analysis records or building a query, treat stepCode as a list. A run that included the definitions analyser will have R-D somewhere inside a longer comma-separated string, not a value that equals R-D exactly.
This is why, when you open a completed analysis, the issues it found may span several categories at once: each issue is tagged with the analyser that raised it, so you can tell an ambiguity finding (R-A) from a missing-element finding (R-M) even though both came out of the same run.
You don't have to memorise the codes. On the analysis screen each one is shown with its full name and description, so you can pick the lenses you want by what they do. See Analysing a requirement for the step-by-step.
Related
- The analysis engine — how analysers are orchestrated and how issues are stored.
- Analysing a requirement — choosing and running analysers, step by step.
- What is DeFOSPAM? — the technique behind the story-analyser codes.
- Glossary — definitions of the terms used on this page.