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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. https://www.linkedin.com/.

  2. https://zoom.us.

  3. https://www.microsoft.com/fr-fr/microsoft-teams/.

  4. https://meet.google.com.

  5. https://ritme.com/software/nvivo/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UMR 9189 CRIStAL, Univ. Lille, CNRS, Inria, Centrale Lille, 59000, Lille, France

    Maxime Savary-Leblanc & Xavier Le Pallec

  2. Université Paris-Saclay, CEA, List, 91120, Palaiseau, France

    Sébastien Gérard

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  1. Maxime Savary-Leblanc
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  2. Xavier Le Pallec
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  3. Sébastien Gérard
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Correspondence to Maxime Savary-Leblanc.

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Communicated by Silvia Abrahao.

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Savary-Leblanc, M., Le Pallec, X. & Gérard, S. Understanding the need for assistance in software modeling: interviews with experts. Softw Syst Model 23, 103–135 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-023-01104-6

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