An experiment to evaluate constraint diagrams with novice users

Authors:
Noora Fetais;Peter C.-H. Cheng
Affiliations:
Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK;Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK
Venue:
Diagrams'10 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Diagrammatic representation and inference
Year:
2010

Citing 3
Cited 0

Constraint diagrams: visualizing invariants in object-oriented models

Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
An Experimental Study into the Default Reading of Constraint Diagrams

VLHCC '05 Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
Evaluating and generalizing constraint diagrams

Journal of Visual Languages and Computing

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Constraint diagrams [1, 2] constitute a graphical notation for program specification. This paper presents an experiment that compares the efficacy of constraint diagrams (CD) with natural language (NL) for understanding program specification statements. In a web-based competition 33 participants were given training either on CD notation or equivalent NL expression, and answered questions about specification statements. It was predicted that the CD participants would find learning and answering questions harder than those in the NL group, because they had no prior experience of CD notation. Although the CD group spent more time on the training examples and were less confident about their answers, they spent less time answering the questions and achieved approximately the same proportion of correct answers as the NL group.