An Empirical Evaluation of the Requirements Engineering Tool for Socio-Technical Systems

One of the major problems of requirements engineering is the lack of sufficient empirical evidence that evaluates the benefits of modelling tools for Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). In this paper, we report on the results of empirical study that compares the modelling effort and effectiveness of the novel software tool for modelling requirements of sociotechnical systems against modelling on paper. We have asked 8 persons who received 2 different treatments - modelling on software against modelling on paper to create 2 requirements models - goal and domain models - for 2 different case studies. The study finds that modelling effort with a software tool nearly equals to modelling effort on paper while modelling effectiveness with a tool is higher than modelling effectiveness on paper. The major limitation of this study is the use of students as participants and the use of small sample size. In the future work, we will conduct another empirical study with a large sample size of professionals that aims to increase the confidence in the results obtained from this empirical study.