Model oriented programming: an empirical study of comprehension
Omar B. Badreddin, Andrew Forward, Timothy C. Lethbridge · Conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research · 2012
Many tools and approaches support the use of modeling abstractions in textual form. However, there have been few studies about whether textual models are as comprehensible as graphical models. We present an experiment investigating the understandability of three different notations: Systems modeled in UML, and the same systems in both Java and Umple. Umple is a model-oriented programming technology that enhances languages like Java and PHP with textual modeling abstractions. It was designed to bridge the gap between textual and graphical modeling. Our experiment asked participants to answer questions reflecting their level of comprehension. The results reveal that for simple comprehension tasks, a visual model and a textual model are comparable. Java's comprehension levels were lowest of all three notations. Our results align with the intuition that raising the abstraction levels of common object-oriented programming languages enhances comprehensibility.