Effects of Model Composition Techniques on Effort and Affective States: A Controlled Experiment (S)

Abstract

Even though existing heuristics and specification-based techniques support composing design models, it is still considered a time-consuming and highly intensive task. In addition, there is a lack of studies exploring the effects of composition techniques on software developers' affective state and development effort. This study reports a pilot study to investigate these effects while developers apply composition techniques to detect and resolve inconsistencies in output-composed models. In this sense, a widely known wearable EEG headset, namely Emotiv EPOC, with 14 channels was used, while developers made use of heuristic-based and specification-based composition techniques to evolve design models. Our results suggest that using heuristic-based techniques produced a higher effect on the developers' affectivity, compared to specification-based techniques. Moreover, the higher the effects on the developers' affectivity, the higher the odds to invest less effort and produce correctly composed design models.

UML2Merge: a UML extension for model merging

“…Moreover, our evaluation focused on the usability and understanding of the UML2Merge. Upcoming evaluations can extend it by proposing new experimental tasks in which merge relationships are manually specified by the stakeholder, and evaluating its impact on affective states [33]. New findings can open doors to quantifying interactions of stakeholders while expressing merge relationships.’…”

Usage of Psychophysiological Data as an Improvement in the Context of Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study

“…Nowadays, studies aim to understand which cognitive processes are related to software development tasks, using technologies as Electroencephalography (EEG) and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) [63,1,26,50,73]. In these studies, the authors advocate that it is possible to find a relation between defect production in software artifacts and the developer's cognitive processes presented when source code was written, aiming the development of mechanisms capable of priory low confidence code refactoring and even prediction of defective software artifacts.…”

“…In these studies, the authors advocate that it is possible to find a relation between defect production in software artifacts and the developer's cognitive processes presented when source code was written, aiming the development of mechanisms capable of priory low confidence code refactoring and even prediction of defective software artifacts. Manica et al [50] investigate how software developer's effort and affective states can be affected by model composition techniques. Vieira and Farias [73] introduce a psychophysiological data integrator approach for for the Microsoft Visual Studio code.…”