Abstract
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the de facto standard
for designing and architecting software systems. UML
offers a large number of diagram types that can be used with
varying degree of rigour. As a result UML models may contain
consistency defects. Previous research has shown that
industrial UML models that are used as basis for implementation
and maintenance contain large numbers of defects.
This study investigates to what extent implementers detect
defects and to what extent defects cause different interpretations
by different readers. We performed two controlled experiments
with a large group of students (111) and a group
of industrial practitioners (48). The experiment’s results
show that defects often remain undetected and cause misinterpretations.
We present a classification of defect types
based on a ranking of detection rate and risk for misinterpretation.
Additionally we observed effects of using domain
knowledge to compensate defects. The results are generalizable
to industrial UML users and can be used for improving
quality assurance techniques for UML-based development.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings 28th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'06, Shanghai, China, May 20-28, 2006) |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery, Inc |
| Pages | 401-411 |
| ISBN (Print) | 1-59593-375-1 |
| Publication status | Published - 2006 |