User Perception of Numeric Contribution Semantics for Goal Models: An Exploratory Experiment

• Published in: Conceptual Modeling pp. 451 - 465
• Main Authors: Alothman, Norah, Zhian, Mehrnaz, Liaskos, Sotirios
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Decision support; Goal models; Model comprehension
• ISBN: 9783319699035; 3319699032
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-69904-2_34

Goal models have long been regarded to be an effective way for representing stakeholder goals and how they relate to one another during requirements engineering. One of the ways goals are connected in goal models is contribution relationships, which represent how satisfaction of one goal affects the satisfaction of another. There are several proposals in the literature on how contributions should be modelled and used, but little empirical evidence as to which one is more intuitive for users. We experimentally explore how users interpret numeric contribution labels in goal models. Experimental participants are exposed to a number of pre-constructed goal models and are asked what they believe the satisfaction degree of a goal is given the satisfaction degree of other goals in the model. We find that users tend to prefer specific aggregation rules over others, depending, also, on specific factors.