A Controlled Experiment on the Effects of Machine Translation in Multilingual Requirements Meetings

Requirements engineering is a communication-intensive activity and thus it suffers much from language difficulties in global software projects. Remote requirements meetings can benefit from machine translation as this technology is today available in the form of cross-language chat services. In this paper, we present the design of a controlled experiment to investigate the effects of automatic machine translation services in requirements meetings. Experiment participants, using either Italian or Portuguese as native language, are asked to interact with a communication tool from a distance in order to prioritize and estimate requirements. First results show that real-time machine translation is not disruptive of the conversation flow and is accepted with favor by participants. However, concrete effects are expected to emerge when language barriers are critical.