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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Index Terms
- Does the use of stereotypes improve the comprehension of UML sequence diagrams?
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