Do Models Improve the Understanding of Safety Compliance Needs?: Insights from a Pilot Experiment

Context. Many critical systems must meet safety compliance needs from safety standards. These standards are usually large textual documents whose compliance needs can be hard to understand. As a solution, the use of models has been proposed. Goal. We aim to provide evidence of the extent to which models improve the understanding of safety compliance needs. Method. We designed an experiment and ran a pilot to study the effectiveness, efficiency, and perceived benefits of understanding these needs, with the text of standards and with models in the form of UML object diagrams. Results. The overall results from 15 Bachelor students show that the effectiveness of understanding safety compliance needs increases very little with models (2%), and the efficiency even decreases (24%). Nonetheless, the results improve when the potential complexity in navigating the models is taken into account (15% effectiveness increase). The students find benefits in using the models but most consider that the models are hard to understand. Conclusions. The extent to which models improve the understanding of safety compliance needs seems to be lower than what the research community expects. New studies are necessary to confirm our initial insights.European CommissionThe research leading to this paper has received funding from the AMASS project (H2020-ECSEL grant agreement no 692474; Spain’s MINECO ref. PCIN-2015-262) and the AMoDDI project (Ref. 11130583)

Software engineering whispers: The effect of textual vs. graphical software design descriptions on software design communication

Context:\ua0Software\ua0engineering\ua0is a social and collaborative activity. Communicating and sharing knowledge between\ua0software\ua0developers requires much effort. Hence, the quality of\ua0communication\ua0plays an important role in influencing project success. To better understand the\ua0effect\ua0of\ua0communication\ua0on project success, more in-depth empirical studies investigating this phenomenon are needed. Objective: We investigate the\ua0effect\ua0of using a\ua0graphical\ua0versus\ua0textual\ua0design\ua0description\ua0on co-located\ua0software\ua0design\ua0communication. Method: Therefore, we conducted a family of experiments involving a mix of 240\ua0software\ua0engineering\ua0students from four universities. We examined how different\ua0design\ua0representations (i.e.,\ua0graphical\ua0vs.\ua0textual) affect the ability to Explain, Understand, Recall, and Actively Communicate knowledge. Results: We found that the\ua0graphical\ua0design\ua0description\ua0is better than the\ua0textual\ua0in promoting Active Discussion between developers and improving the Recall of\ua0design\ua0details. Furthermore, compared to its unaltered version, a well-organized and motivated\ua0textual\ua0design\ua0description–that is used for the same amount of time–enhances the recall of\ua0design\ua0details and increases the amount of active discussions at the cost of reducing the perceived quality of explaining

Architecture design in global and model-centric software development

This doctoral dissertation describes a series of empirical investigations into representation, dissemination and coordination of software architecture design in the context of global software development. A particular focus is placed on model-centric and model-driven software development.LEI Universiteit LeidenAlgorithms and the Foundations of Software technolog

On the Influence of Representation Type and Gender on Recognition Tasks of Program Comprehension

RÉSUMÉ L’objectif de la maintenance logicielle est d’améliorer les logiciels existants en préservant leur intégrité. La maintenance peut représenter jusqu’à 60% du budget d’un logiciel. Ainsi, améliorer la maintenabilité des logiciels est bénéfique aussi bien pour les fournisseurs que les utilisateurs de logiciels. Les développeurs de logiciels consacrent un effort considérable à la compréhension des programmes, qui est une étape primordiale à la maintenance logicielle. Nous faisons l’hypothèque que le genre des développeurs de logiciels et le type de représentation peut affecter leur effort et leur efficacité. Ces facteurs doivent être considérés et minutieusement analysés dans la mesure où ils peuvent cacher certains effets significatifs pouvant être identifiés en analysant le processus de compréhension. Dans cette thèse, nous nous inspirons de l’utilisation de l’occulomètre pour l’étude du processus cognitif lors de la résolution des problèmes. Nous avons effectué une étude fonctionnelle pour évaluer tous les travaux de recherche faisant usage de l’occulomètre en génie logiciel. Les résultats obtenus nous ont motivé à utiliser l’occulomètre pour effectuer un ensemble d’études afin analyser l’effet de deux facteurs importants sur la compréhension des programmes : le type de représentation (textuelle ou graphique) et le genre du développeur. Afin de comprendre comment les différents types de représentations et le genre influencent les stratégies de visualisation, nous avons étudié la différence de stratégie entre développeurs. Les résultats obtenus montrent que, comparé à une représentation graphique, la représentation sous forme de texte structuré aide mieux le développeur dans son processus cognitif lors de la compréhension des programmes de petite taille. Ainsi, la représentation textuelle requiert moins de temps et d’effort aux participants. Par contre, la représentation graphique est celle préférée par les développeurs. Nos résultats montrent que la structure topologique de la représentation graphique aide les développeurs à mémoriser l’emplacement des éléments et à retrouver plus rapidement les éléments pertinents comparé à la représentation textuelle. En plus, la structure hiérarchique de la représentation graphique guide les développeurs à suivre une stratégie de visualisation spécifique. Nous avons observé que les femmes et les hommes ont des stratégies de visualisation différentes lors de la lecture du code ou de la mémorisation des noms des identificateurs. Les femmes ont tendance à inspecter minutieusement toutes les options afin de procéder à l’élimination de la mauvaise réponse. Au contraire, les hommes ont tendance à inspecter brièvement certaines réponses. Pendant que les femmes consacrent plus de temps à analyser chaque type d’entité l’un après l’autre, les hommes alternent leur attention entre différents type d’entité.----------ABSTRACT The purpose of software maintenance is to correct and enhance an existing software system while preserving its integrity. Software maintenance can cost more than 60% of the budget of a software system, thus improving the maintainability of software is important for both the software industry and its customers. Program comprehension is the initial step of software maintenance that requires the major amount of maintenance’s time and effort. We conjuncture that developers’ gender and the type of representations that developers utilize to perform program comprehension impact their efficiency and effectiveness. These factors must be considered and carefully studied, because they may hide some significant effects to be found by analyzing the comprehension process. In this dissertation, inspired by the literature on the usefulness of eye-trackers to study the cognitive process involved in problem solving activities, we perform a mapping study and evaluate all research relevant to the use of eye-tracking technique in software engineering. The results motivate us to perform a set of eye-tracking studies to analyze the impact of two important factors on program comprehension: representation type (textual vs. graphical) and developers’ gender. Moreover, we investigate and compare viewing strategies variability amongst developers to understand how the representation type and gender differences influence viewing strategies. Overall, our results indicate that structured text provides more cognitive support for developers while performing program comprehension with small systems compared to a graphical representation. Developers spend less time and effort working with textual representations. However, developers mostly preferred to use graphical representations and our results confirm that the topological structure of graphical representations helps developers to memorize the location of the elements and to find the relevant ones faster in comparison with textual representation. Moreover, the hierarchical structure of the representation guides developers to follow specific viewing strategies while working with representations. Regarding the impact of gender, our results emphasize that male and female developers exploit different viewing strategies while reading source code or recalling the names of identifiers. Female developers seem to carefully weigh all options and rule out wrong answers, while male developers seem to quickly set their minds on some answers and move forward. Moreover, female developers spend more time on each source code entity and analyze it before going to the next one. In contrast, male developers utilize several attention switching strategies between different source code entities