Assessing the Usefulness of a Requirements Monitoring Tool: A Study Involving Industrial Software Engineers

Requirements monitoring approaches support defining and checking the run-time behavior and performance characteristics of complex software systems. However, although numerous monitoring tools have been described in the literature, hardly any empirical studies exist on their usefulness for software engineering practitioners. Empirical data on usefulness, however, is important for practitioners to select and adapt the capabilities of monitoring tools for their application context. This paper first describes common capabilities of requirements monitoring tools and then empirically assesses the usefulness of these capabilities as implemented in the monitoring tool REMINDS. We report findings from an initial assessment of the tool we performed using the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations Framework. We then present results of a usefulness study involving software engineers of a large company from the domain of automation software. Finally, we discuss implications for developers of requirements monitoring tools.