WCSE

Improving Feedback to Novice Learners on Constructing i* Requirements Diagrams

Abstract— Although a number of free computer-aided tools are available to help users construct requirements models according to the prescribed design rules of the i* modelling language, none of the tools surveyed thus far provided a full set of syntax checking features. To cover this gap in the current i* tools landscape, we are developing a web-based system called i*Check to complement the available tools and offer users automatic on-demand feedback on the syntactical quality of their diagram designs. In this work, we use i*Check to explore how different kinds of feedback can help the beginner recognize design mistakes at an early stage in learning. By asking new learners to debug a series of i* diagrams, we investigated the effectiveness of our tool in guiding them to locate and correct defects in given designs compared to some existing tools’ checking features. We aimed to determine the factors that contribute to the success or failure of our solution. Based on experimental observations we noticed that i) the usage of i*Check seems to lead to a good overall score and ii) this tool bears potential for improvement especially making it more concise in locating where in a diagram the defects appear.

Index Terms— design quality of requirements models, i* framework, recognition and correction of design errors.

Hajer Mejri
Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Technology, Shinshu University, JAPAN
Pauline N. Kawamoto
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shinshu University, JAPAN

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Cite: Hajer Mejri, Pauline N. Kawamoto, "Improving Feedback to Novice Learners on Constructing i* Requirements Diagrams," Proceedings of 2016 6th International Workshop on Computer Science and Engineering, pp. 603-606, Tokyo, 17-19 June, 2016.