The requirements have become a key aspect in the development of computer applications. However, a large number of software projects have difficulties due to poor definition, specification or requirement management. Therefore, it is important to investigate the quality characteristics of the software requirements and the metrics that measure them. This article aims to determine the quality characteristics of the software requirements, their concepts and the existing metrics to measure them, in order to obtain parameters that guide the process of capturing, specifying and evaluating the requirements. In order to know the information available about this topic, a systematic literature mapping (SMS) was developed, contemplating a search in different academic databases such as ACM, IEEE, SCOPUS, and WOS. Given the limited number of items found, the technique "snowball" should be used in addition. From the SMS, 18 primary items were obtained, of which 2 belonged to ACMDL, 6 to SCOPUS and 10 to snowball. The analysis of the information reflects reduced research on the quality characteristics of the software requirements, and partial efforts to address part of the problem from other areas such as linguistics, psychology, neuroscience and mathematics are evident.