An experiment on the impact of transparency on the effectiveness of requirements documents

Effective communication is important to successful software development, but it is difficult to achieve. We believe transparency — the visibility of information to stakeholders — is an important factor in the effectiveness of communication in software projects. We theorise that more effective communication results from more transparent requirements documents. To test our theory, we conducted an experiment. We developed an operational definition of transparency with three attributes: accessibility, understandability, and relevance. We had students and software practitioners use requirements documents of differing levels of transparency based on these attributes to answer questions. We found that participants with the more transparent document spent less time, answered more questions correctly, and were more confident about their answers, than participants with the less transparent document. The results of our experiment provide evidence that our view of transparency may help evaluate the effectiveness of documents as a form of communication. Further work is needed to reproduce our results, and to determine whether they are generalizable to other types of stakeholders and forms of communication.