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On the effect of using SysML requirement diagrams to comprehend requirements: results from two controlled experiments

Published: 13 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

We carried out a controlled experiment and an external replication to investigate whether the use of requirement diagrams of the System Modeling Language (SysML) helps in the comprehensibility of requirements. The original experiment was conducted at the University of Basilicata in Italy with Bachelor students, while its replication was executed at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden with Bachelor and Master students. A total of 87 participants took part in the experiment and its replication. The achieved results indicated that the comprehension of requirements is statistically significant when requirements specification documents include requirement diagrams without any impact on the time to accomplish comprehension tasks. On the basis of our results, we also present and discuss possible implications from the practitioner and researcher perspectives.

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    EASE '14: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
    May 2014
    486 pages
    ISBN:9781450324762
    DOI:10.1145/2601248
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 13 May 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. SysML
    2. UML
    3. controlled experiment
    4. replication
    5. requirements comprehension
    6. software models

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    EASE '14
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    • Brunel University

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    • (2020)Software Architectures—Views and DocumentationAutomotive Software Architectures10.1007/978-3-030-65939-4_2(19-53)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2020
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    • (2017)Model comprehension for security risk assessmentEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-017-9502-822:6(3017-3056)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2017
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    • (2016)Do Models Improve the Understanding of Safety Compliance Needs?Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/2961111.2962621(1-6)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2016
    • (2016)Towards Improved Requirements Engineering with SysML and the User Requirements Notation2016 IEEE 24th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)10.1109/RE.2016.58(329-334)Online publication date: Sep-2016
    • (2015)Towards the Development of a Framework for Encouraging the Learning of SPICE Model by Using Knowledge GraphsSoftware Process Improvement and Capability Determination10.1007/978-3-319-19860-6_16(203-216)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2015

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