A field study of the software design process for large systems
Communications of the ACM
Coordination in software development
Communications of the ACM
Experimentation in software engineering: an introduction
Experimentation in software engineering: an introduction
On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
Communications of the ACM
Case study: extreme programming in a university environment
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Guest Editors' Introduction: Global Software Development
IEEE Software
The human-computer interaction handbook
Object-oriented modeling with UML: a study of developers' perceptions
Communications of the ACM - Why CS students need math
Maintaining mental models: a study of developer work habits
Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering
The Materiality of the Internet
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
Communications of the ACM
Ambidextrous coping strategies in globally distributed software development projects
Communications of the ACM
Global Software Engineering: The Future of Socio-technical Coordination
FOSE '07 2007 Future of Software Engineering
Developing a knowledge-based perspective on coordination: The case of global software projects
Information and Management
Human-Computer Interaction
Software Engineering: Principles and Practice
Software Engineering: Principles and Practice
Software Language Engineering
Multimedia Learning
Level of detail in UML models and its impact on model comprehension: A controlled experiment
Information and Software Technology
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Experimental Analysis of Textual and Graphical Representations for Software Architecture Design
ESEM '11 Proceedings of the 2011 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Adapting grounded theory to construct a taxonomy of affect in collaborative online chat
Proceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication
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Software design documentation is an important aid for communication during software development and maintenance. Nevertheless, little empirical evidence exists regarding the use of software documentation, and effective software design representation in particular. In an experimental setting, we used documentation from industry in which aspects of a software design were modeled in both a (UML) diagram and text. We recorded and analysed how participants used these media to answer various design-related questions and collected additional information in various questionnaires. By having participants think aloud, we set out to understand the underlying cognitive processes of developer design comprehension by applying the grounded theory method. We validated the results with concepts from the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. Results show a positive correlation between developer certainty and correctness of answers, whereas the opposite was not found. Also, self-rated experience and self-rated skill coincide with higher levels of certainty. We found that participants rated information based on perceived importance and that their "common sense" plays a significant role. Surprisingly, more than 60 percent of the answers were based on the consultation of a single medium. These results clearly ask for further investigation. We propose corresponding future work.