The Role of Cognitive Abilities in Requirements Inspection: Comparing UML and Textual Representations

TL;DR

This study investigates how UML diagrams alongside textual requirements influence inspection accuracy and how cognitive abilities like working memory and mental rotation affect performance, revealing that individual cognitive profiles modulate UML effectiveness.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the interaction between cognitive abilities and UML support in requirements inspection, highlighting the importance of personalized approaches.

Findings

High cognitive abilities improve justification accuracy with UML.

UML support reduces violation detection performance for high-capacity individuals.

Cognitive abilities interact significantly with representation type in inspection tasks.

Abstract

The representation of requirements plays a critical role in the accuracy of requirements inspection. While visual representations, such as UML diagrams, are widely used alongside text-based requirements, their effectiveness in supporting inspection is still debated. Cognitive abilities, such as working memory and mental rotation skills, may also influence inspection accuracy. This study aims to evaluate whether the use of UML sequence diagrams alongside text-based requirements improves the accuracy of requirements inspection compared to text-based requirements alone and to explore whether cognitive abilities are associated with differences in performance across the two treatments (text vs text with UML support). We conducted a crossover experiment with 38 participants to assess the accuracy of requirements inspection under the two treatments in terms of issues found and justifications provided. Linear mixed-effects and generalized linear models were used to analyse the effects of treatment, period, sequence, and cognitive abilities. The results indicate a significant three-way interaction between representation type, working memory capacity, and mental rotation ability. This finding suggests that the effectiveness of UML support is not uniform across individuals: participants with high scores in both cognitive abilities experienced reduced performance when using UML for violation detection. Conversely, the same cognitive profile was associated with improved justification accuracy under UML-aided inspection, indicating that higher cognitive abilities may support deeper reasoning processes when dealing with multi-modal information, i.e., diagrams and text.