Structured tools and conditional logic: an empirical investigation
Communications of the ACM
Graphical vs. textual representation: an empirical study of novices' program comprehension
Empirical studies of programmers: second workshop
Shotgun correlations in software measures
Software Engineering Journal
Why looking isn't always seeing: readership skills and graphical programming
Communications of the ACM
Experimental design and analysis in software engineering, part 5: analyzing the data
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
Mathematical Notation in Formal Specification: Too Difficult for the Masses?
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
The B-book: assigning programs to meanings
The B-book: assigning programs to meanings
Building Knowledge through Families of Experiments
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Qualitative Methods in Empirical Studies of Software Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Software engineering (6th ed.)
Software engineering (6th ed.)
Principles of survey research: part 3: constructing a survey instrument
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
Confessions of a formal methodist
SCS '02 Proceedings of the seventh Australian workshop conference on Safety critical systems and software 2002 - Volume 15
UML Bible
UML-B: Formal modeling and design aided by UML
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Comprehensibility of UML-based formal model: a series of controlled experiments
Proceedings of the 1st ACM international workshop on Empirical assessment of software engineering languages and technologies: held in conjunction with the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) 2007
Model-driven engineering practices in industry
Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
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The primary objective of software specification is to promote understanding of the system properties between stakeholders. Specification comprehensibility is essential particularly during software validation and maintenance as it permits the understanding of the system properties more easily and quickly prior to the required tasks. Formal notation such as B increases a specification's precision and consistency. However, the notation is regarded as being difficult to comprehend due to its unfamiliar symbols and rules of interpretation. Semi-formal notation such as the Unified Modelling Language (UML) is perceived as more accessible but it cannot be verified systematically to ensure a specification's accuracy. Integrating the UML and B could perhaps produce an accurate and approachable specification. This paper presents an experimental comparison of the comprehensibility of a UML-based graphical formal specification versus a purely textual formal specification. The measurement focused on the efficiency in performing the comprehension tasks. The experiment employed a cross-over design and was conducted on forty-one third-year and masters students. The results show that the integration of semi-formal and formal notations expedites the subjects' comprehension tasks with accuracy even with limited hours of training.