An Experiment on the Effects of Using Color to Visualize Requirements Analysis Tasks

Recent approaches have investigated assisting users in making early trade-off decisions when the future evolution of project elements is uncertain. These approaches have demon-strated promise in their analytical capabilities; yet, stakeholders have expressed concerns about the readability of the models and resulting analysis, which builds upon Tropos. Tropos is based on formal semantics enabling automated analysis; however, this creates a problem of interpreting evidence pairs. The aim of our broader research project is to improve the process of model comprehension and decision making by improving how analysts interpret and make decisions. We extend and evaluate a prior approach, called EVO, which uses color to visualize evidence pairs. In this scientific evaluation paper, we explore the effectiveness and usability of EVO. We conduct an experiment (n = 32) to measure any effect of using colors to represent evidence pairs. We find that with minimal training, untrained modelers were able to use the color visualization for decision making. The visualization significantly improves the speed of model comprehension and users found it helpful.