A Framework for Empirical Evaluation of Model Comprehensibility

Authors:
Jorge Aranda;Neil Ernst;Jennifer Horkoff;Steve Easterbrook
Affiliations:
University of Toronto, Canada;University of Toronto, Canada;University of Toronto, Canada;University of Toronto, Canada
Venue:
MISE '07 Proceedings of the International Workshop on Modeling in Software Engineering
Year:
2007

Citing 13
Cited 5

External cognition: how do graphical representations work?

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Information modeling in the time of the revolution

Information Systems - Special issue: selected papers from the 9th International Conference on advanced information systems engineering (CA ISE '97)
Comprehending Object and Process Models: An Empirical Study

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Experimentation in software engineering: an introduction

Experimentation in software engineering: an introduction
Flowcharts versus program design languages: an experimental comparison

Communications of the ACM
Investigating the readability of state-based formal requirements specification languages

Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering
Structured Flowcharts Outperform Pseudocode: An Experimental Comparison

IEEE Software
How Do We Understand a System with (So) Many Diagrams? Cognitive Integration Processes in Diagrammatic Reasoning

Information Systems Research
Using benchmarking to advance research: a challenge to software engineering

Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering
Evaluating modeling techniques based on models of learning

Communications of the ACM - Service-oriented computing
An Experimental Investigation of Formality in UML-Based Development

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
How UML is used

Communications of the ACM - Two decades of the language-action perspective
The Impact of UML Documentation on Software Maintenance: An Experimental Evaluation

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Towards realism in drawing areas of interest on architecture diagrams

Journal of Visual Languages and Computing
On the effectiveness of screen mockups in requirements engineering: results from an internal replication

Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Cognitive complexity in business process modeling

CAiSE'11 Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Advanced information systems engineering
Making the case for measuring mental effort

Proceedings of the Second Edition of the International Workshop on Experiences and Empirical Studies in Software Modelling
Comparing the comprehensibility of requirements models expressed in Use Case and Tropos: Results from a family of experiments

Information and Software Technology

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

If designers of modelling languages want their creations to be used in real software projects, the communication qualities of their languages need to be evaluated, and their proposals must evolve as a result of these evaluations. A key quality of communication artifacts is their comprehensibility. We present a flexible framework to evaluate the comprehensibility of model representations that is grounded on the underlying theory of the language to be evaluated, and on theoretical frameworks in cognitive science.