Analyzing the understandability of Requirements Engineering languages for CSCW systems: A family of experiments

  • Authors:

  • Miguel A. Teruel;Elena Navarro;VíCtor LóPez-Jaquero;Francisco Montero;Javier Jaen;Pascual GonzáLez

  • Affiliations:

  • LoUISE Research Group, Computing Systems Department, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Avda. España s/n, 02071 Albacete, Spain;LoUISE Research Group, Computing Systems Department, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Avda. España s/n, 02071 Albacete, Spain;LoUISE Research Group, Computing Systems Department, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Avda. España s/n, 02071 Albacete, Spain;LoUISE Research Group, Computing Systems Department, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Avda. España s/n, 02071 Albacete, Spain;ISSI, Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Camino de Vera s/n. 46022 Valencia, Spain;LoUISE Research Group, Computing Systems Department, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Avda. España s/n, 02071 Albacete, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Information and Software Technology
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Context: A collaborative system is a special kind of software whose users can perform collaboration, communication and collaboration tasks. These systems usually have a high number of non-functional requirements, resulting from the users' need of being aware of other users with whom to collaborate, that is, the workspace awareness. Objective: This paper aims at evaluating two Requirements Engineering languages i^* and CSRML (an extension of i^*) in order to determine which is the most suitable one to specify requirements of collaborative systems, taking into account their special characteristics regarding collaboration and awareness. Method: We performed a family of experiments comprising an original experiment and two replicas. They were performed by 30, 45 and 9 Computer Science students, respectively, from Spain and Argentina. These subjects filled in two understandability questionnaires once they analyzed the requirements models of two systems: an e-learning collaborative system and a conference review system with some collaborative aspects support. Both models were specified by using the evaluated languages. Results: The statistical analysis of the family of experiments showed that the understandability was higher for the models specified with CSRML than for those specified with i^*, especially for collaborative aspects. This result was also confirmed by the meta-analysis conducted. Conclusions: CSRML surpasses i^* when modeling collaborative systems requirements models due to the specific expressiveness introduced to represent collaboration between users and awareness and the new resorts to manage actors and roles.