On the impact of UML analysis models on source-code comprehensibility and modifiability

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

Volumn 23, Issue 2, 2014, Pages

  Scanniello, Giuseppe ^a   Gravino, Carmine ^b   Genero, Marcela ^c   Cruz Lemus, Jose A ^c   Tortora, Genoveffa ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BASILICATA   (Italy)

^b UNIVERSITY OF SALERNO   (Italy)

^c UNIVERSITY OF CASTILLA LA MANCHA   (Spain)

Author keywords

Analysis models; Comprehensibility; Controlled experiment; Family of experiments; Maintenance; Modifiability; Replicated experiments; UML

Indexed keywords

MAINTENANCE; REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING; UNIFIED MODELING LANGUAGE;

ANALYSIS MODELS; COMPREHENSIBILITY; CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT; MODIFIABILITY; REPLICATED EXPERIMENT; UML;

EXPERIMENTS;

EID: 84897988356     PISSN: 1049331X     EISSN: 15577392     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1145/2491912     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. Marwen Abbes, Foutse Khomh, Yann-Gael Gueheneuc, and Giuliano Antoniol. 2011. An empirical study of the impact of two antipatterns, blob and spaghetti code, on program comprehension. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, 181-190.
2. Silvia Mara Abrahão, Carmine Gravino, Emilio Insfran Pelozo, Giuseppe Scanniello, and Genoveffa Tortora. 2012. Assessing the effectiveness of sequence diagrams in the comprehension of functional requirements: results from a family of five experiments. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng.
3. Ritu Agarwal and Atish P. Sinha. 2003. Object-oriented modeling with UML: A study of developers' perceptions. Commun. ACM 46, 9, 248-256.
4. Bente Anda, Kai Hansen, Ingolf Gullesen, and Hanne Kristin Thorsen. 2006. Experiences from introducing UML-based development in a large safety-critical project. Empirical Softw. Eng. 11, 4, 555-581.
5. Erik Arisholm, Lionel C. Briand, Siw Elisabeth Hove, and Yvan Labiche. 2006. The impact of UML documentation on software maintenance: An experimental evaluation. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 32, 365-381. (Pubitemid 44194205)
6. Hazeline U. Asuncion, Frédéric François, and Richard N. Taylor. 2007. An end-to-end industrial software traceability tool. In Proceedings of the 6th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. 115-124.
7. Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto. 1999. Modern Information Retrieval. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA.
8. R. Baker. 1995. Modern permutation test software. In Randomization Tests, 3rd Ed., E. Edgington, Ed. Marcel Dekker, Inc., New York, NY.
9. Victor Basili, Forrest Shull, and Filippo Lanubile. 1999. Building knowledge through families of experiments. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 25, 4, 456-473. (Pubitemid 129304112)
10. Victor R. Basili, Scott Green, Oliver Laitenberger, Filippo Lanubile, Forrest Shull, Lars Sivert Sørumgård, and Marvin V. Zelkowitz. 1996. The empirical investigation of perspective-based reading. Empirical Softw. Eng. 1, 2, 133-164. (Pubitemid 126708443)
11. Victor R. Basili and H. Dieter Rombach. 1988. The TAME project: Towards improvement-oriented software environments. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 14, 6, 758-773. (Pubitemid 18640017)
12. Biostat. 2006. Comprehensive Meta-Analysis v. 2. In Biostat Manual, Englewood, NJ.
13. Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh, and Ivar Jacobson. 2005. Unified Modeling Language User Guide, 2nd Ed. Addison-Wesley Professional.
14. B. Bruegge and A. H. Dutoit. 2003. Object-Oriented Software Engineering: Using UML, Patterns and Java, 2nd Ed. Prentice-Hall.
15. David Budgen, Andy J. Burn, O. Pearl Brereton, Barbara A. Kitchenham, and Rialette Pretorius. 2011. Empirical evidence about the UML: A systematic literature review. Softw. Pract. Exp. 41, 4, 363-392.
16. Jeffrey Carver, Letizia Jaccheri, Sandro Morasca, and Forrest Shull. 2003. Issues in using students in empirical studies in software engineering education. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Metrics. IEEE Computer Society, 239.
17. David Cohen, Mikael Lindvall, and Patricia Costa. 2004. An introduction to agile methods. Adv. Comput. 62, 1-66.
18. M. Colosimo, A. De Lucia, G. Scanniello, and G. Tortora. 2009. Evaluating legacy system migration technologies through empirical studies. Inf. Softw. Technol. 51, 12, 433-447.
19. W. J. Conover. 1998. Practical Nonparametric Statistics. 3rd Ed. Wiley.
20. Sergio Cozzetti B. de Souza, Nicolas Anquetil, and Káthia M. de Oliveira. 2005. A study of the documentation essential to software maintenance. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Design of Communication: Documenting & Designing for Pervasive Information. ACM, New York, NY, 68-75. (Pubitemid 43196505)
21. J. L. Devore and N. Farnum. 1999. Applied Statistics for Engineers and Scientists. Duxbury.
22. B. Dobing and J. Parsons. 2006. How UML is used. Commun. ACM 49, 5, 109-113. (Pubitemid 44046412)
23. Wojciech J. Dzidek, Erik Arisholm, and Lionel C. Briand. 2008. A realistic empirical evaluation of the costs and benefits of UML in software maintenance. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 34, 407-432.
24. P. Ellis. 2010. The Essential Guide to Effect Sizes: Statistical Power, Meta-Analysis, and the Interpretation of Research Results. Cambridge University Press.
25. John Erickson and Keng Siau. 2007. Theoretical and practical complexity of modeling methods. Commun. ACM 50, 8, 46-51. (Pubitemid 47169586)
26. A. Fernández-Saez, M. Genero, J. Nelson, G. Poels, and M. Piattini. 2012. A systematic literature review on the quality of UML models. J. Data. Manage. 22, 3, 46-70.
27. Carmine Gravino, Michele Risi, Giuseppe Scanniello, and Genoveffa Tortora. 2011. Does the documentation of design pattern instances impact on source code comprehension? Results from two controlled experiments. In Proceeding of the Working Conference on Reverse Engineering. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, 67-76.
28. Carmine Gravino, Michele Risi, Giuseppe Scanniello, and Genoveffa Tortora. 2012. Do professional developers benefit from design pattern documentation? A replication in the context of source code comprehension. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 185-201.
29. Carmine Gravino, Genoveffa Tortora, and Giuseppe Scanniello. 2010. An empirical investigation on the relation between analysis models and source code comprehension. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. ACM, 2365-2366.
30. Martin Grossman, Jay E. Aronson, and Richard V. McCarthy. 2005. Does UML make the grade? Insights from the software development community. Inf. Softw. Technol. 47, 6, 383-397. (Pubitemid 40391292)
31. L. Hedges and I. Olkin. 1985. Statistical Methods for Meta-Analysis. Academia Press.
32. Martin Höst, Björn Regnell, and Claes Wohlin. 2000. Using students as subjects: Comparative study of students and professionals in lead-time impact assessment. Empirical Softw. Eng. 5, 3, 201-214. (Pubitemid 32085481)
33. Andreas Jedlitschka, Marcus Ciolkowski, and Dietmar Pfahl. 2008. Reporting experiments in software engineering. In Guide to Advanced Empirical Software Engineering, Forrest Shull, Janice Singer, and Dag I. K. Sjøberg, Eds., Springer, 201-228.
34. N. Juristo and A. Moreno. 2001. Basics of Software Engineering Experimentation. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
35. Vigdis By Kampenes, Tore Dybå, Jo Erskine Hannay, and Dag I. K. Sjøberg. 2007. A systematic review of effect size in software engineering experiments. Inf. Softw. Technol. 49, 11-12, 1073-1086. (Pubitemid 47464910)
36. Barbara Kitchenham, Hiyam Al-Khilidar, Muhammed Babar, Mike Berry, Karl Cox, Jacky Keung, Felicia Kurniawati, Mark Staples, He Zhang, and Liming Zhu. 2008. Evaluating guidelines for reporting empirical software engineering studies. Empirical Softw. Eng. 13, 97-121.
37. B. Kitchenham, S. Pfleeger, L. Pickard, P. Jones, D. Hoaglin, K. El Emam, and J. Rosenberg. 2002. Preliminary guidelines for empirical research in software engineering. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 28, 8, 721-734.
38. Soren Lauesen. 2002. Software Requirements: Styles and Techniques. Addison-Wesley.
39. H. Levene. 1960. Robust tests for equality of variances. In Contributions to Probability and Statistics, I. Olkin Ed., Stanford University Press., Palo Alto, CA.
40. M. Lindvall and K. Sandahl. 1996. Practical implications of traceability. Softw. Pract. Exp. 26, 10, 1161-1180. (Pubitemid 126599660)
41. Mitch Lubars, Colin Potts, and Charlie Richter. 1993. A review of the state of the practice in requirements modeling. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Requirements Engineering. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2-14.
42. J. McDermid. 1991. Software Engineer's Reference Book. Butterworth-Heinemann, Ltd., Oxford, U.K.
43. Manoel G. Mendonça, José C. Maldonado, Maria C. F. de Oliveira, Jeffrey Carver, Sandra C. P. F. Fabbri, Forrest Shull, Guilherme H. Travassos, Erika Nina Höhn, and Victor R. Basili. 2008. A framework for software engineering experimental replications. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, 203-212. (Pubitemid 351714790)
44. OMG. 2010. Unified Modeling Language (TM) URL. Tech. Rep. Object Management Group. http://www.uml.org.
45. A. N. Oppenheim. 1992. Questionnaire Design, Interviewing and Attitude Measurement. Pinter, London.
46. Lutz Prechelt, Barbara Unger-Lamprecht, Michael Philippsen, and Walter F. Tichy. 2002. Two controlled experiments assessing the usefulness of design pattern documentation in program maintenance. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 28, 6, 595-606. (Pubitemid 34835479)
47. Filippo Ricca, Massimiliano Di Penta, Marco Torchiano, Paolo Tonella, and Mariano Ceccato. 2010. How Developers' experience and ability influence web application comprehension tasks supported by UML stereotypes: a series of four experiments. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 36, 1, 96-118.
48. Giuseppe Scanniello, Carmine Gravino, and Genny Tortora. 2010. Investigating the role of UML in the software modeling and maintenance - A preliminary industrial survey. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems. SciTePress, 141-148.
49. Giuseppe Scanniello, Carmine Gravino, and Genoveffa Tortora. 2012. Does the combined use of class and sequence diagrams improve the source code comprehension?: Results from a controlled experiment. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Experiences and Empirical Studies in Software Modelling. ACM, New York, NY, 25-30.
50. G. Scanniello, F. Ricca, and M. Torchiano. 2011. On the effectiveness of the UMLobject diagrams: A replicated experiment. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering. IET Digital Library, 76-85.
51. S. Shapiro and M. Wilk. 1965. An analysis of variance test for normality. Biometrika 52, 3-4, 591-611.
52. Forrest Shull, Jeffrey C. Carver, Sira Vegas, and Natalia Juristo Juzgado. 2008. The role of replications in empirical software engineering. Empirical Softw. Eng. 13, 2, 211-218.
53. Forrest Shull, Manoel G. Mendoncça, Victor Basili, Jeffrey Carver, José C. Maldonado, Sandra Fabbri, Guilherme Horta Travassos, and Maria Cristina Ferreira. 2004. Knowledge-sharing issues in experimental software engineering. Empirical Softw. Eng. 9, 1-2, 111-137.
54. D. I. K. Sjøberg, J. E. Hannay, O. Hansen, V. B. Kampenes, A. Karahasanovic, N. Liborg, and A. C. Rekdal. 2005. A survey of controlled experiments in software engineering. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 31, 9, 733-753. (Pubitemid 41555415)
55. Scott Tilley and Shihong Huang. 2003. A qualitative assessment of the efficacy of UML diagrams as a form of graphical documentation in aiding program understanding. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Documentation. ACM, New York, NY, 184-191. (Pubitemid 40498310)
56. Eirik Tryggeseth. 1997. Report from an experiment: Impact of documentation on maintenance. Empirical Softw. Eng. 2, 2, 201-207. (Pubitemid 127506171)
57. S. Vegas, N. Juristo, A. Moreno, M. Solari, and P. Letelier. 2006. Analysis of the influence of communication between researchers on experiment replication. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering. ACM, New York, NY, 28-37. (Pubitemid 46634438)
58. Jan Verelst. 2004. The influence of the level of abstraction on the evolvability of conceptual models of information systems. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society, 17-26. (Pubitemid 40062815)
59. Klaus Weidenhaupt, Klaus Pohl, Matthias Jarke, and Peter Haumer. 1998. Scenarios in system development: Current practice. IEEE Softw. 15, 34-45. (Pubitemid 128562250)
60. C. Wohlin, P. Runeson, M. Höst, M. Ohlsson, B. Regnell, and A. Wesslén. 2000. Experimentation in Software Engineering-An Introduction. Kluwer.