Unveiling Developers' Mindset Barriers to Software Modeling Adoption
Reyhaneh Kalantari, Timothy C. Lethbridge · 2023
This paper presents a qualitative empirical study that seeks to delve into and illuminate the mindset barriers confronted by software developers that hinder the acceptance and use of software modeling techniques. Although software modeling provides acknowledged advantages, such as improving quality, facilitating superior comprehension of system behavior, and enhancing stakeholder communication, it remains significantly underutilized among developers. The primary objective of this research is to understand these barriers not as a result of just technological challenges, but rather as deeply-rooted mindset barriers entrenched within the developer community. Utilizing a grounded theory approach, we conducted extensive interviews with a broad range of developers from various backgrounds. The data were analyzed to identify common themes and patterns. The findings provide insights into the developers' perspectives, revealing key mindset barriers such as tooling and support concerns, challenges posed by modern work paradigms, behavioral resistance, lack of perceived value, knowledge deficiency and skill deficiency. The results of this study serve as a stepping stone towards developing strategies to overcome these mindset barriers, with the aim of fostering a wider acceptance of software modeling techniques. The study contributes to our understanding of the human factors at play in the broader software engineering field.