Understanding the need for assistance in software modeling: interviews with experts

Software modeling has shown for many years that it brings many advantages at the cost of various efforts and constraints. A large corpus of literature has indeed grown up over the years, pointing out the problems related to the modeling abstraction process, the usability of tools, or the practical d...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Veröffentlicht in:Software and systems modeling Jg. 23; H. 1; S. 103 - 135
Hauptverfasser: Savary-Leblanc, Maxime, Le Pallec, Xavier, Gérard, Sébastien
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.02.2024
Springer Nature B.V
Springer Verlag
Schlagworte:
Compilers
Computer Science
Context
Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet)
Interpreters
IT in Business
Modelling
Programming Languages
Programming Techniques
Qualitative analysis
Qualitative research
Questionnaires
Regular Paper
Software
Software Engineering
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
Task complexity
Tooling
Usability
Practitioners
Software modeling
Interviews
Software assistant
ISSN:1619-1366, 1619-1374
Online-Zugang:Volltext
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Software modeling has shown for many years that it brings many advantages at the cost of various efforts and constraints. A large corpus of literature has indeed grown up over the years, pointing out the problems related to the modeling abstraction process, the usability of tools, or the practical difficulty of using modeling languages. While these works identify problems, few of them focus on proposing directions to explore in order to fix them. To move toward a smoother and less constraining modeling experience and then increase the added value of modeling approaches, it is necessary to identify new paths to improve current tooling. In this paper, we explore one specific path by investigating how new software assistance features could support users performing modeling tasks that they perceive as complex. We used UML knowledge as a criterion for the selection of participants and built a questionnaire general to software modeling. We followed a user-centered research approach and collected the feedback from practitioners who use the modeling languages and the modeling tools on a regular basis in an industrial context. This article reports on a set of individual interview sessions with 16 modeling experts about how they perform modeling and how they imagine assistance in the context of their work. From the analysis of this qualitative study, we draw twelve observations on how to design software assistants for software modeling. These observations highlight research directions for both tool vendors and academics to explore, to identify and design new solutions to the friction points of the software modeling experience.
Bibliographie:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:1619-1366
1619-1374
DOI:10.1007/s10270-023-01104-6