UML has been described by some as “the lingua franca of software engineering”. Evidence from industry does not necessarily support such endorsements. How exactly is UML being used in industry - if it is? This paper presents a corpus of interviews with 50 professional software engineers in 50 companies and identifies 5 patterns of UML use.

https://homepages.dcc.ufmg.br/~figueiredo/disciplinas/papers/icse13petre.pdf

UML in practice

The goal of any modeling activity is a complete and accurate understanding of the real-world domain, within the bounds of the problem at hand and keeping in mind the goals of the stakeholders involved. High-quality representations are critical to that understanding. This paper proposes a comprehensive Conceptual Modeling Quality Framework, bringing together two well-known quality frameworks: the framework of Lindland, Sindre, and Solvberg (LSS) and that of Wand and Weber based on Bunge's ontology (BWW). This framework builds upon the strengths of the LSS and BWW frameworks, bringing together and organizing the various quality cornerstones and then defining the many quality dimensions that connect one to another. It presents a unified view of conceptual modeling quality that can benefit both researchers and practitioners.

A conceptual modeling quality framework

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was created on the basis of expert opinion and has now become accepted as the ‘standard’ object-oriented modelling notation. Our objectives were to determine how widely the notations of the UML, and their usefulness, have been studied empirically, and to identify which aspects of it have been studied in most detail. We undertook a mapping study of the literature to identify relevant empirical studies and to classify them in terms of the aspects of the UML that they studied. We then conducted a systematic literature review, covering empirical studies published up to the end of 2008, based on the main categories identified. We identified 49 relevant publications, and report the aggregated results for those categories for which we had enough papers— metrics, comprehension, model quality, methods and tools and adoption. Despite indications that a number of problems exist with UML models, researchers tend to use the UML as a ‘given’ and seem reluctant to ask questions that might help to make it more effective. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Empirical evidence about the UML: a systematic literature review

10 years of software architecture knowledge management

Use case modeling, including use case diagrams and use case specifications (UCSs), is commonly applied to structure and document requirements. UCSs are usually structured but unrestricted textual documents complying with a certain use case template. However, because Use Case Models (UCMods) remain essentially textual, ambiguity is inevitably introduced. In this article, we propose a use case modeling approach, called Restricted Use Case Modeling (RUCM), which is composed of a set of well-defined restriction rules and a modified use case template. The goal is two-fold: (1) restrict the way users can document UCSs in order to reduce ambiguity and (2) facilitate the manual derivation of initial analysis models which, when using the Unified Modeling Language (UML), are typically composed of class diagrams, sequence diagrams, and possibly other types of diagrams.Though the proposed restriction rules and template are based on a clear rationale, two main questions need to be investigated. First, do users find them too restrictive or impractical in certain situationsq In other words, can users express the same requirements with RUCM as with unrestricted use casesq Second, do the rules and template have a positive, significant impact on the quality of the constructed analysis modelsq To investigate these questions, we performed and report on two controlled experiments, which evaluate the restriction rules and use case template in terms of (1) whether they are easy to apply while developing UCMods and facilitate the understanding of UCSs, and (2) whether they help users manually derive higher quality analysis models than what can be generated when they are not used, in terms of correctness, completeness, and redundancy. This article reports on the first controlled experiments that evaluate the applicability of restriction rules on use case modeling and their impact on the quality of analysis models. The measures we have defined to characterize restriction rules and the quality of analysis class and sequence diagrams can be reused to perform similar experiments in the future, either with RUCM or other approaches.Results show that the restriction rules are overall easy to apply and that RUCM results into significant improvements over traditional approaches (i.e., with standard templates, without restrictions) in terms of class correctness and class diagram completeness, message correctness and sequence diagram completeness, and understandability of UCSs.

Facilitating the transition from use case models to analysis models: Approach and experiments

The Unified Modeling Language has attracted many organizations and practitioners. UML is now the de facto modeling language for software development. Several features account for its popularity: it's a standardized notation, rich in expressivity; UML 2.0 provides 13 diagram types that enable modeling several different views and abstraction levels. Furthermore, UML supports domain-specific extensions using stereotypes and tagged values. Finally, several case tools integrate UML modeling with other tasks such as generating code and reverse-engineering models from code. Our study focused on UML use and model quality in actual projects rather than on its adequacy as a notation or language.

J. Muskens

Papers

In practice: UML software architecture and design description