A controlled empirical evaluation of a requirements abstraction model

Requirement engineers in industry are faced with the complexity of handling large amounts of requirements as development moves from traditional bespoke projects towards market-driven development. There is a need for usable and useful models that recognize this reality and support the engineers in a continuous effort of choosing which requirements to accept and which to dismiss off hand using the goals and product strategies put forward by management. This paper presents an evaluation of such a model that is built based on needs identified in industry. The evaluation’s primary goal is to test the model’s usability and usefulness in a lab environment prior to large scale industry piloting, and is a part of a large technology transfer effort. The evaluation uses 179 subjects from three different Swedish Universities, which is a large portion of the university students educated in requirements engineering in Sweden during 2004 and 2005. The results provide a strong indication that the model is indeed both useful and usable and ready for industry trials.