Evaluation of BehaviorMap: A user-centered behavior language

In the software development process, one of the recurring problems is to ensure that the expectations of stakeholders are being met. These expectations must match the system´s behavior and be present in the requirements specifications and models. The Requirements Engineering discipline studies how to capture, specify, validate and manage requirements. However, recent empirical studies show that stakeholders do not usually understand traditional requirements models. This paper focuses on the cognitive evaluation of a user-centered language called BehaviorMap that aims to specify behavioral user scenarios in a cognitive way, based on mind map modelling. This paper describes an experimental evaluation to verify the understandability of the BehaviorMap scenarios compared to the textual ones. The experiment gathered data from 15 individuals (naïve-users), with different backgrounds, that had to analyze 8 scenarios, being 4 graphical and 4 textual. To assess the participants´ cognitive effort, it was used questionnaires. Also, the time effort to perform the tasks was measured. This experiment showed promising results for the BehaviorMap scenarios.