Welcome to the Experiment in Comparing Software Documents.

This experiment is being undertaken as a part of a PhD research project at the University of Auckland by Yu-Cheng Tu. This experiment investigats how effective different types of software documents are in presenting functional requirements to different type of stakeholders. There are two types of participants for this experiment, software developers and tertiary students.

This experiment also involves the use of a questionnaire (either online or written), which takes approximately 1 hour to complete. A software document that describes the functionality of a software system is given to participants. In the questionnaire, participants are asked some questions about the given software document.

We are currently analysing the responses collected from this experiment. A summary of the research findings will be made available online at summary of the findings after the completion of this part of the PhD research project.

The materials used in this experiment can be found in the following links. We welcome any researchers to reproduce our experiment for their studies. If you have any questions about the experiment or if you have any suggestions for us, please feel free to contact Yu-Cheng Tu at ytu001@aucklanduni.ac.nz.

Experimental Materials

This experiment uses two types of requirements documents and a questionnaire. The UAM IMS Requirements Specification describes an integration of an accommodation management system and an identity management system for an organisation. The requirements specification document is written in free text format, and does not follow any specific standards. The UAM IMS Use Case Model is created using the information from the requirements specification document. The questionnaire is used for participants to answer questions about the documents given to them during the experimental session.

• UAM IMS Requirements Specification
• UAM IMS Use Case Model
• Questionnaire