Assesing the understandability of collaborative systems requirements notations: An empirical study

Abstract

As for single user systems, a proper specification of software requirements is a very important issue to achieve the quality of the collaborative systems. Nevertheless, many of these requirements are from a non-functional nature because are related to the user's need of being aware of other users, that is, the workspace awareness. In order to model these special kind of requirements, CSRML, an extension of i∗ has been proposed. In this paper, we present a controlled experiment to assess the understandability of this notation compared to i∗. The specification of two different systems was used as experimental material and undergraduate students of Computer Science with an average of two years experience in Requirements Engineering were the experimental subjects.