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

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.