Preliminary study to empirically investigate the comprehensibility of requirements specifications

This paper presents a pilot study to test plans for an empirical study, which will compare the comprehensibility of two specifications: a formal specification and an informal specification. The two documents used in the pilot study implemented the same logic, namely a portion of the Irish Electoral system. The “informal specification” was taken directly from the legal definition of the count rules for Irish elections. A formal requirements specification language was not employed for the pilot study. In place of a formal requirements specification language, the java programming language was used. Our main motivation for using the java programming language is based on an empirical study carried out in [19].