Using formal models to objectively judge quality of multi-threaded programs in empirical studies
Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Models in software engineering
Assessing the benefits of synchronization-adorned sequence diagrams: two controlled experiments
Proceedings of the 4th ACM symposium on Software visualization
MoDELS '08 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems
Empirical Software Engineering
Design and evaluation of extensions to UML sequence diagrams for modeling multithreaded interactions
Information Visualization
An Experimental Comparison of Use Case Models Understanding by Novice and High Knowledge Users
Proceedings of the 2010 conference on New Trends in Software Methodologies, Tools and Techniques: Proceedings of the 9th SoMeT_10
Information and Software Technology
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Programs that use multi-threaded concurrency are known to be difficult to design. Moreover, research in computer-science education suggests that concurrency and synchronization concepts are generally difficult to master. It stands to reason that comprehension tasks may be more complex for programs that employ concurrency than for sequential programs. We believe that external representations, specifically refinements to some of the popular UML modeling notations, should aid students in mastering fundamental concurrency/ synchronization concepts and should enable practitioners to better comprehend the dynamically evolving nature of the these programs. In this paper, we present our synchronization adorned UML (saUML) sequence diagram notation that highlights aspects of thread interactions and describe an empirical study of whether these diagrams, as opposed to purely textual representations, help students to better understand concurrent executions and concurrency concepts, as measured by their ability to answer questions about a particular execution of a multi-threaded system. A statistically significant benefit was found from the study.