Evaluating the Impact of Pair Documentation on Requirements Quality and Team Productivity

TL;DR

This empirical study investigates how pair documentation, where two individuals collaboratively create requirements documents, improves the quality and productivity of requirements engineering compared to traditional methods.

Contribution

It provides evidence that pair documentation significantly enhances requirements quality and team productivity, filling a research gap in collaborative documentation approaches.

Findings

Pair documentation improves requirements quality.

Pair documentation increases team productivity.

Significant differences observed between experimental and control groups.

Abstract

The most important deliverable of the requirements engineering process is the software requirements specification(SRS)document. Requirements documentation is important during the complete software development lifecycle to share the vision and effective communication between major stakeholders. The Standish Group reported that the top factors behind project failures are related to requirements. By giving the right level of attention to key requirements good quality software can be produced. Therefore, more research is needed in this area and this study is trying to fill this gap. This empirical study aims to examine the importance of pair documentation. Unconventional documentation refers to the approach when two persons work on the same document's requirements collaboratively just like pair programming on the requirements quality and team productivity. Twenty pairs of documentation writers worked into two groups. one group using pair documentation, i.e., the experimental group, and the other one using conventional documentation, i.e., the control group. the resultant requirement's documents for the same project, produced by both groups were then compared. It is observed that there is a significant improvement in the quality and productivity of the experimental group using pair documentation. The findings of this study may assist requirement engineers in forming efficient teams that can create high-quality SRS documents.