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Does the use of stereotypes improve the comprehension of UML sequence diagrams?

Published:09 October 2008Publication History

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on a controlled experiment that investigates the influence of stereotypes in UML sequence diagrams. The comprehension of UML sequence diagrams with and without stereotypes is analyzed from three different perspectives: semantic comprehension, retention and transfer. The experiment was carried out with 77 undergraduate students of Computer Science from the University of Bari in Italy. The results obtained show a slight tendency in favor of the use of stereotypes in facilitating the comprehension of UML sequence diagrams. Further replications are needed to obtain more conclusive results.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Conferences
        ESEM '08: Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement
        October 2008
        374 pages
        ISBN:9781595939715
        DOI:10.1145/1414004
        • General Chair:
        • Dieter Rombach,
        • Program Chairs:
        • Sebastian Elbaum,
        • Jürgen Münch

        Copyright © 2008 ACM

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 9 October 2008

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        Overall Acceptance Rate130of594submissions,22%

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