Developing techniques for using software documents: a series of empirical studies

This proposal presents an empirical method for developing “reading techniques” that give effective, procedural guidance to software practitioners. Each reading technique is tailored so that it can be used to accomplish a specific software-related task (e.g. defect detection) using a specific kind of software document (e.g. requirements). This empirical method can be followed to create and then continually improve reading techniques, since it explicitly builds and tests underlying models of how developers use a particular software document in a particular environment. That is, our approach for developing reading techniques checks the underlying assumptions about: • Specific tasks for which the document will be used • Aspects of the document that must be understood to support those tasks • Aspects of the environment affecting tasks using the document This empirical approach avoids the mistake of applying assumptions that are true in other environments to a context in which they have not been tested. We illustrate the development method by discussing how it was used to create two reading techniques (one for finding defects in requirements, and a second for reusing design and code from an Object-Oriented framework in a new system). We describe a series of studies by which we and other researchers have assessed the effectiveness of these techniques in practical situations. These studies show that these reading techniques are useful and effective guidelines for accomplishing real software engineering tasks, and thus demonstrate the effectiveness of the empirical development method. Finally, this proposal discusses how indications from these studies have been used to begin to formulate higher-level hypotheses about reading techniques. We discuss the results from these earlier studies as well as important questions that have not yet been addressed. We propose a further study that is designed to test potential improvements to one of our reading techniques and, in the process, shed some light on the unanswered questions from our earlier studies.