Linking Variants for Use Cases with Requirements and their Effects on Reading Behavior

What is it about?

Use cases and natural language requirements are typical artifacts in requirements engineering that are closely related to each other. Over time, numerous use case templates have been developed that propose different variants for linking a use case with its associated natural language requirements. In this paper, we investigate how the most popular linking variants affect the reading behavior in an eye tracking study.

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Photo by Ion Fet on Unsplash

Photo by Ion Fet on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The main purpose of all linking variants is to show the interrelationships between a use case and its associated natural language requirements. A reader must not only consider both artifacts individually, but also relate them to each other to gain a comprehensive understanding of the overall content. Due to the effort to create and maintain links, it is important to understand how different linking variants affect the reading behavior. Our findings indicate that all investigated variants cause comparable visual effort and share the most frequent reading pattern. In all cases, the use case was read first and then the requirements. Nevertheless, the different variants result in different reading behaviors. Especially, links embedded in the table of a use case description significantly increase the number of attention switches from the use case to the requirements. These attention switches represent the reading behavior of interrelating the use case and the associated requirements, which only occurred in case of the most detailed linking variant.