The Influence of the Level of Abstraction on the Evolvability of Conceptual Models of Information Systems

  • Authors:

  • Jan Verelst

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Management Information Systems, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • Empirical Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2005

  • Model size matters

    MoDELS'06 Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Models in software engineering

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Abstract

In today's dynamic environments, evolvability of information systems is an increasingly important characteristic. We investigate evolvability at the analysis level, i.e. at the level of the conceptual models that are built of information systems (e.g. UML models). More specifically, we focus on the influence of the level of abstraction of the conceptual model on the evolvability of the model. Abstraction or genericity is a fundamental principle in several research areas such as reuse, patterns, software architectures and application frameworks. The literature contains numerous but vague claims that software based on abstract conceptual models has evolvability advantages. Hypotheses were tested with regard to whether the level of abstraction influences the time needed to apply a change, the correctness of the change and the structure degradation incurred. Two controlled experiments were conducted with 136 subjects. Correctness and structure degradation were rated by human experts. Results indicate that, for some types of change, abstract models are better evolvable than concrete ones. Our results provide insight into how the rather vague claims in literature should be interpreted.