Interactive views to improve the comprehension of UML models - an experimental validation

Software development is becoming more and more model-centric. As a result models are used for a large variety of purposes, such as quality analysis, understanding, and maintenance. We argue that the UML and related existing tooling does not offer sufficient support to the developer to understand the models and evaluate their quality. We have proposed and implemented a collection of views to increase model understanding: MetaView, ContextView, MetricView, and UML-City-View. The purpose of this experiment is to validate whether there is a difference between the proposed views and the existing views with respect to comprehension correctness and comprehension effort. The comprehension task performed by the subjects was to answer a questionnaire about a model. 100 MSc students with relevant background knowledge have participated in the experiment. The results are statistically significant and show that the correctness is improved by 4.5% and that the time needed is reduced by 20%.