Evaluating Presentation of Requirements Documents: Results of an Experiment

There are diverse stakeholders for requirements documents in many development environments, and yet these requirements documents should be presented in such a way that all stakeholders will be able to engage them successfully. In order to produce effective requirements documents, analysts need guidance when developing new documents. They also need a convenient and accurate way to evaluate the effectiveness of existing documents. We have been exploring whether our three-factor measurement of document “transparency” would be useful in these ways. Our experimental results, presented in this article, support the hypothesis that transparency can be usefully characterised by accessibility, understandability, and relevance.