TY - GEN
T1 - Is a picture worth a thousand words? A comparative analysis of using textual and graphical approaches to specify use cases
AU - Nascimento, Elizamary
AU - Silva, Williamson
AU - Conte, Tayana
AU - Steinmacher, Igor
AU - Massollar, Jobson
AU - Travassos, Guilherme Horta
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
PY - 2016/9/19
Y1 - 2016/9/19
N2 - Use cases specifications are artifacts employed in all stages of software development, from the requirements elicitation to implementation. During this process, issues related to ambiguity, redundancy, inconsistency, and incompleteness can affect these specifications. These issues can harm software engineers’ understanding and, consequently, affect the software quality. Given this context, this paper describes an empirical study to evaluate two different use cases specifications approaches (textual and graphical-based forms). We compared the approaches by assessing the degree of correctness and the time spent to generate the specifications. In addition, we performed an analysis focusing on evaluating the ease of use and usefulness of each approach. The quantitative results showed that textual form and graphical-based specifications presented similar levels of correctness and the time spent to generate them were also similar. The qualitative results indicated that the subjects had difficulties using both approaches; however, subjects stated that graphic-based specifications were easier and more useful to specify use cases.
AB - Use cases specifications are artifacts employed in all stages of software development, from the requirements elicitation to implementation. During this process, issues related to ambiguity, redundancy, inconsistency, and incompleteness can affect these specifications. These issues can harm software engineers’ understanding and, consequently, affect the software quality. Given this context, this paper describes an empirical study to evaluate two different use cases specifications approaches (textual and graphical-based forms). We compared the approaches by assessing the degree of correctness and the time spent to generate the specifications. In addition, we performed an analysis focusing on evaluating the ease of use and usefulness of each approach. The quantitative results showed that textual form and graphical-based specifications presented similar levels of correctness and the time spent to generate them were also similar. The qualitative results indicated that the subjects had difficulties using both approaches; however, subjects stated that graphic-based specifications were easier and more useful to specify use cases.
KW - Empirical study
KW - UML
KW - Use cases specifications
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85035376104&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85035376104&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2973839.2973855
DO - 10.1145/2973839.2973855
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85035376104
SN - 9781450342018
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
SP - 93
EP - 102
BT - Proceedings - SBES 2016
A2 - Santanda de Almeida, Eduardo
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 30th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2016
Y2 - 19 September 2016 through 23 September 2016
ER -