Linking Use Cases and Associated Requirements: On the Impact of Linking Variants on Reading Behavior

Abstract

A wide variety of use case templates supports different linking variants. The main purpose of all linking options is to highlight the interrelationships between a use case and its associated requirements. Regardless of the linking, a reader needs to consider all materials together in order to achieve a high understanding of the overall content. Due to the efforts of creating and maintaining links, we investigated their impact on the reading behavior in terms of visual effort and intended way of interrelating both artifacts in an eye tracking study. Our findings show that all investigated linking variants cause comparable visual effort and share the most frequent reading pattern. In all cases, the use case and the requirements are read separated and successively. Nevertheless, we found significant differences in the reading behaviors between the linking variants. Only the most detailed linking variant significantly increases the number of attention switches between both artifacts which represents the required reading behavior of interrelating both artifacts. This summary refers to the paper “Interrelating Use Cases and Associated Requirements by Links – An Eye Tracking Study on the Impact of Different Linking Variants on the Reading Behavior” [KRS18] which was published as original research article in the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering.