Distributed versus face-to-face meetings for architecture evalution: a controlled experiment

  • Authors:

  • Muhammad Ali Babar;Barbara Kitchenham;Ross Jeffery

  • Affiliations:

  • National ICT Australia Ltd, Alexandria, Australia and University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;National ICT Australia Ltd, Alexandria, Australia;National ICT Australia Ltd, Alexandria, Australia and University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Scenario-based methods for evaluating software architecture require a large number of stakeholders to be collocated for evaluation sessions. Collocating stakeholders is often an expensive exercise. To reduce expense, we have proposed a framework for supporting software architecture evaluation process using groupware systems. This paper presents a controlled experiment that we conducted to assess the effectiveness of scenario profile construction using distributed meetings. We used a cross-over experiment involving 32 teams of three 3rd and 4th year undergraduate students. We found that the quality of scenarios produced by distributed teams using a groupware tool were significantly better than the quality of scenarios produced by face-to-face teams (p