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Student experience with software modeling tools

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Abstract

Modeling is a key concept in software engineering education, since students need to learn it in order to be able to produce large-scale and reliable software. Quality tools are needed to support modeling in education, but existing tools vary considerably both in their features and in their strengths and weaknesses. The objective of the research presented in this paper was to help professors and students choose tools by determining which strengths and weaknesses matter most to students, which tools exhibit which of these strengths and weaknesses, and how difficult to use are various tools for students. To achieve this objective, we conducted a survey of the use of modeling tools among students in software engineering courses from Brazil, Canada, USA, Spain, Denmark, UK and China. We report the results regarding the 31 UML tools that 117 participants have used, focusing on the nine tools that the students have used most heavily. Common benefits quoted by students in choosing a tool include simplicity of installing and learning, being free, supporting the most important notations and providing code generation. The most cited complaints about tools include lack of feedback, being slow to use, difficulty drawing the diagrams, not interacting well with other tools and being complex to use. This research also compares the results with the findings of another survey conducted among professors who taught modeling. The results should benefit tool developers by suggesting ways they could improve their tools. The results should also help inform the selection of tools by educators and students.

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Notes

  1. The exact Rational product was not identified.

  2. In much of the analysis later in the paper, the count of students is 117. That is because one of the students did not provide their country of origin and certain other data, so we could not use that student’s data in all analysis.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the participants in this survey and the professors who forwarded the survey to their students. Dr. Lethbridge’s research is funded in part by NSERC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Mid-West State University (UNICENTRO), Guarapuava, Brazil

    Luciane T. W. Agner & Inali W. Soares

  2. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

    Timothy C. Lethbridge

Authors
  1. Luciane T. W. Agner
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  2. Timothy C. Lethbridge
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  3. Inali W. Soares
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Correspondence to Timothy C. Lethbridge.

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Communicated by Dr Jeff Gray.

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Agner, L.T.W., Lethbridge, T.C. & Soares, I.W. Student experience with software modeling tools. Softw Syst Model 18, 3025–3047 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-018-00709-6

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