Metrics for Evaluating and Improving Transparency in Software Engineering: An Empirical Study and Improvement Model

Abstract Transparency remains an emerging non-functional requirement that stakeholders in the software engineering process (SEP) must consider. Existing studies provide evidence of the usefulness of transparency and offer hindsight on how transparency may be evaluated in different contexts. Considering communication, software maintainability, and stakeholders’ productivity, SEP has not thoroughly explored the benefits of transparency. Currently, there is no appropriate measurement of transparency in SEP, and the consequence of this is that theoretically and empirically, the factors that characterise transparency and their interrelationships are unknown. This study empirically validates measures and metrics for evaluating and improving software-development-life-cycle-product transparency. It investigates the correlations between transparency factors and their corresponding metrics. Following the Goal Question Metric paradigm, it proposes a transparency evaluation and improvement model based on the transparency factors, measures, and metrics. The usefulness of the metrics was demonstrated via a controlled experiment to investigate the impact of transparency on the maintainability of software requirements specifications (SRS) and its support for good communication and stakeholders’ productivity. Results suggest that object-oriented SRS are easier to maintain and offer better communication and more productivity. The practical implication of our findings is that adopting use case modelling in developing SRS benefits from transparency implicitly. Secondly, a transparency evaluation team can use the improvement model to evaluate SRS transparency explicitly and and improve SRS based on the evaluation outcome. Our proposals can be applied early in the requirements engineering and design phases of SEP. The model can be used to diagnose and deal with maintainability and communication problems with SRSs and design documents.