Experimentally investigating effects of defects in UML models
Cfj Christian Lange, Mrv Michel Chaudron · TU/e Research Portal · 2005
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the de facto standard for designing and architecting software systems.With a large variety of diagram types it offers a large degree of freedom.Mainly due to this there is a potential risk for consistency defects and lack of completeness in UML models.Previous research has shown that in industrial UML models a large number of defects occur.The purpose of this study is to investigate to what extent implementers detect defects and to what extent undetected defects cause different interpretations by different readers.Therefore we performed two controlled experiments with a large group of students and a smaller group of industrial practitioners respectively.The experiment's results show that defects often remain undetected and cause misinterpretations.As a result of this study we present a ranking of defect types according to detection rate and risk for misinterpretation.Additionally we observed effects of using domain knowledge to compensate defects and effects of the order in which the diagrams are presented.The results are generalizable to industrial UML users.