An experiment to observe the impact of UML diagrams on the effectiveness of software requirements inspections

Software inspections aim to find defects early in the development process and studies have found them to be effective. However, there is almost no data available regarding the impact of UML diagram utilization in software requirements specification documents on inspection effectiveness. This paper addresses this issue by investigating whether inclusion of UML diagrams impacts the effectiveness of requirements inspection. We conducted an experiment in an academic environment with 35 subjects to empirically investigate the impact of UML diagram inclusion on requirements inspections´ effectiveness and the number of reported defects. The results show that including UML diagrams in requirements specification document significantly impacts the number of reported defects, and there is no significant impact on the effectiveness of individual inspections.