Using practitioners for assessing the understandability of UML statechart diagrams with composite states

  • Authors:

  • José A. Cruz-Lemus;Marcela Genero;Sandro Morasca;Mario Piattini

  • Affiliations:

  • ALARCOS Research Group, Department of Information Technologies and Systems, Indra-UCLM Research and Development Institute, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain;ALARCOS Research Group, Department of Information Technologies and Systems, Indra-UCLM Research and Development Institute, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain;Dipartimento di Scienze Della Cultura, Politiche e dell'Informazione, Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Como, Italy;ALARCOS Research Group, Department of Information Technologies and Systems, Indra-UCLM Research and Development Institute, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain

  • Venue:
  • ER'07 Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Advances in conceptual modeling: foundations and applications
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We have carried out a family of empirical studies to investigate whether the use of composite states improves the understandability of UML statechart diagrams. Our hypothesis derived from conventional wisdom, which says that hierarchical modeling mechanisms are helpful to master a system's complexity. We carried out three studies that have gradually evolved in the size of the UML statechart models, the type of subjects (students vs. professionals), the familiarity of the subjects with the domains of the diagrams, and other factors. In this work we briefly review the first and second studies and present the third one, performed with practitioners as experimental subjects. Surprisingly, our results do not seem to show that the use of composite states improves the understandability of UML statechart diagrams.