Assessing the Effectiveness of Sequence Diagrams in the Comprehension of Functional Requirements: Results from a Family of Five Experiments

Modeling is a fundamental activity within the requirements engineering process and concerns the construction of abstract descriptions of requirements that are amenable to interpretation and validation. The choice of a modeling technique is critical whenever it is necessary to discuss the interpretation and validation of requirements. This is particularly true in the case of functional requirements and stakeholders with divergent goals and different backgrounds and experience. This paper presents the results of a family of experiments conducted with students and professionals to investigate whether the comprehension of functional requirements is influenced by the use of dynamic models that are represented by means of the UML sequence diagrams. The family contains five experiments performed in different locations and with 112 participants of different abilities and levels of experience with the UML. The results show that sequence diagrams improve the comprehension of the modeled functional requirements in the case of high ability and more experienced participants

The Usability of E-learning Platforms in Higher Education: A Systematic Mapping Study

The use of e-learning in higher education has increased significantly in recent years, which has led to several studies being conducted to investigate the usability of the platforms that support it. A variety of different usability evaluation methods and attributes have been used, and it has therefore become important to start reviewing this work in a systematic way to determine how the field has developed in the last 15 years. This paper describes a systematic mapping study that performed searches on five electronic libraries to identify usability issues and methods that have been used to evaluate e-learning platforms. Sixty-one papers were selected and analysed, with the majority of studies using a simple research design reliant on questionnaires. The usability attributes measured were mostly related to effectiveness, satisfaction, efficiency, and perceived ease of use. Furthermore, several research gaps have been identified and recommendations have been made for further work in the area of the usability of online learning

On the Effectiveness of Dynamic Modeling in UML: Results from an External Replication

In this paper, we propose an automatic approach to group web pages that are similar at the content level. The approach uses the Levenshtein string edit distance and Latent Semantic Indexing to compute page dissimilarity and then groups them using iteratively a Graph-Theoretic clustering algorithm. To automate the clustering process a prototype has been implemented and used to assess the proposed approach on three web sites

Definition and evaluation of a COSMIC measurement procedure for sizing Web applications in a model-driven development environment

CONTEXT: Model-driven development approaches facilitate the production of Web applications. Among them, the Object-Oriented Hypermedia method (OO-H) has been successfully used for the development of industrial Web applications. Similarly to other development approaches, it is important also in this context to put measures in place to support project managers in resource allocation, cost and schedule control, and productivity monitoring. OBJECTIVE: This motivated us to define a measurement procedure, named OO-HCFP, specifically conceived for OO-H Web applications based on COSMIC, a second-generation functional size measurement method. Method. We present mapping and measurement rules devised to automatically derive size measures from OO-H models. We also carry out an empirical study to evaluate whether our proposed measurement procedure, OO-HCFP, is useful for estimating the effort needed to realise industrial Web applications developed with OO-H. RESULTS: The estimates obtained by using OO-HCFP are more accurate than those obtained by using other measurement approaches based on Function Points and design measures. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed approach can be profitably exploited to size Web applications developed with OO-H. Based on our experience, we also provide some guidelines to support the formulation of COSMIC measurement procedures for other model-driven approaches