Comparing the comprehensibility of requirements models expressed in Use Case and Tropos: Results from a family of experiments

Context: Over the years, several modeling languages for requirements have been proposed. These languages employ different conceptual approaches, including scenario-based and goal-oriented ones. Empirical studies providing evidence about requirements model comprehensibility are rare, especially when addressing languages that belong to different modeling approaches. Objective: This work aims to compare the comprehensibility of requirements models expressed in different but comparable modeling approaches from a requirements analysts’ perspective. In particular, in this paper we compare the comprehensibility of requirements models expressed in two visual modeling languages: Use Case, which is scenario-based, and Tropos, which exploits goal-oriented modeling. We further compare the effort required for comprehending the different models, and the derived productivity