How Developers' Experience and Ability Influence Web Application Comprehension Tasks Supported by UML Stereotypes: A Series of Four Experiments

Abstract

In recent years, several design notations have been proposed to model domain-specific applications or reference architectures. In particular, Conallen has proposed the UML Web Application Extension (WAE): a UML extension to model Web applications. The aim of our empirical investigation is to test whether the usage of the Conallen notation supports comprehension and maintenance activities with significant benefits, and whether such benefits depend on developers ability and experience. This paper reports and discusses the results of a series of four experiments performed in different locations and with subjects possessing different experience-namely, undergraduate students, graduate students, and research associates-and different ability levels. The experiments aim at comparing performances of subjects in comprehension tasks where they have the source code complemented either by standard UML diagrams or by diagrams stereotyped using the Conallen notation. Results indicate that, although, in general, it is not possible to observe any significant benefit associated with the usage of stereotyped diagrams, the availability of stereotypes reduces the gap between subjects with low skill or experience and highly skilled or experienced subjects. Results suggest that organizations employing developers with low experience can achieve a significant performance improvement by adopting stereotyped UML diagrams for Web applications.

On the Impact of Layout Quality to Understanding UML Diagrams: Size Matters

“…Previous work by Abraho, Ricca and others [1,22] suggests that the expertise level is important in diagram understanding, and when controlling for expertise levels, more interesting phenomena become visible (see Table 3). In this table, we have used the same arrangement of values in cells as in Table 2, but have split the data between modelers with lower and higher levels of expertise (left and right, respectively).…”

“…The more elusive higher levels like layout patterns, diagram flow, and the correspondence between a diagram and its intended message seem to have not yet been studied empirically at all. The influence of the expertise level, on the other hand, has been studied [1,22].…”

Automatic identification of class stereotypes

“…A number of studies [1][2][3][4][5][6] demonstrate the benefits of using stereotypes, which reflect semantics, in program comprehension, design, and software maintenance tasks. Using class stereotype information [4][5][6] as a factor in laying out UML class diagrams has shown to improve the comprehensibility of the diagram.…”

A family of experiments to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of source code obfuscation techniques

“…Similarly to [25], we test medians, using a one-tailed Mann-Whitney test for the null hypothesis Qx ≥ 3, where 3 corresponds to "Undecided", and Qx is the median for question Qx. A similar analysis is performed, only for subjects receiving obfuscated code, for questions related to the use made of the debugger (Q9), the difficulty in comprehending obfuscated code (Q17) and the usefulness of executing the system to understand it when the code is obfuscated (Q18).…”