Software Requirements Elicitation - A Controlled Experiment to Measure the Impact of a Native Natural Language

Software development is a collaborative activity where the quality of the end product depends to a great extent on the quality of the requirements engineering process. This paper examines the impact of multi-natural language backgrounds (English and Arabic) of the requirements engineers on the quality and correctness of the use case modeling. The study is done through a controlled experiment. The results show that using a native language for system description improves the functional correctness of the use case model. However, the time required to perform use case modeling and the quality of use case diagrams is not affected by using either native or English (as a second language).