Analyzing the Effect of the Collaborative Interactions on Performance of Requirements Validation

Context: Requirements validation is critical in the pursuit of quality software. It usually demands the collaboration of multiple stakeholders with different perspectives. Question: Our community has reported scarce experimental studies on the role of collaborative interaction in requirements validation. The goal of this study is to explore the effect of collaborative interactions on the performance of requirements validation. Principal ideas: We performed a quasi-experiment involving 118 bachelor students to act analysts, and 40 volunteering students from the Social Sciences department to act clients. The requirements were specified using UML activity diagrams. The overall performance is measured in terms of efficiency (missing requirements correctly identified in a time interval), and effectiveness (degree to which the validation yielded the correct result). Moreover, we measured also subjects’ satisfaction on collaboration (questionnaire). Contribution: We found that the teams composed exclusively of analysts showed better efficiency and effectiveness than mixed teams (client and analysts). However, for certain types of requirements, the mixed teams’ efficiency was superior. Also, the degree of satisfaction was higher among the clients than among the analysts. We end up with identifying future research topics.