The Participants

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The participants in this experiment will have to have some experience with reading requirements documents. PBR will be evaluated against the participants' usual technique.

If the experimental environment is in industry, the usual technique will be the technique which is normally applied within the development organization.
If the experiment is run in a classroom setting, we assume students should already have been taught about requirements reviews and will be applying some technique which they have just been taught. However, in this case it is crucial that the students get enough training to minimize any learning effects.

Any number of participants may be used, though fewer than 12 subjects may represent too few data points to result in statistically significant results. We assume 18 participants (IDs will be 01-18) for our discussion here, though the design may be easily scaled up or down.

We recommend assigning reviewer IDs to participants in the order they arrive, using the scheme illustrated in the following chart. This assures that the reviewers in each group will be randomized, and that the number of reviewers using each perspective and in each thread will be as even as possible.

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