Tooling advances inspired to address observed challenges of developing UML-like models when using modelling tools
Parsa Pourali · 2018
Unified Modelling Language (UML) has become the de-facto standard language for developing models of software system. During the past decades, many tools have been proposed to facilitate the task of developing UML-like models, specifically developing Class and State-Machine diagrams. Most of the tools have focused on addressing technical aspects (e.g., checking the semantics of the language) rather than the usability. The literature shows that tools' usability is a major barrier to the adoption of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) in the industry. We hypothesize that the reason is a paucity of research on User Experience (UX) in the modelling community, and discuss that there are opportunities for further enhancements with respect to UX. We conducted a formative user study to observe, identify and understand the users' cognitive challenges when performing their tasks using modelling tools. The results of the study revealed that two of the most severe challenges of modellers when using modelling tools are: 1) Remembering the contextual information, and 2) Locating, understanding and fixing errors in the models. Our next steps are to propose solutions such as tooling features in order to alleviate the identified challenges and evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions on users.