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Efficacy, Efficiency and Effectiveness of SMarty-based Software Product Line Inspection Techniques: a Controlled Quasi-Experiment

Published: 25 January 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Software quality is impacted by several factors, including the quality of the artifacts generated during the development process. Especially for Software Product Lines (SPL), as artifacts are reused for various specific products, a defect can be spread out over an SPL. Our research group has previously created two inspection techniques for UML-based SPLs: a checklist-based, named SMartyCheck, and a perspective-based, named SMartyPerspective. Seeking to understand the efficiency, efficacy, and effectiveness of such techniques, we carried out a controlled quasi-experiment with 16 participants from the Software Engineering area. It aimed at inspecting feature diagrams and use case, class, component, and sequence diagrams designed using the SMarty approach for UML-based variability support. We also considered ad hoc inspections in such a study. The results of this experiment provide incipient evidence of no statistical difference among the compared techniques for efficiency, efficacy, and effectiveness.

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  1. Efficacy, Efficiency and Effectiveness of SMarty-based Software Product Line Inspection Techniques: a Controlled Quasi-Experiment

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    VaMoS '23: Proceedings of the 17th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems
    January 2023
    101 pages
    ISBN:9798400700019
    DOI:10.1145/3571788
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 25 January 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. Ad hoc
    2. Checklist-Based Reading
    3. Defects
    4. Perspective-Based Reading
    5. SMarty
    6. SPL Inspections
    7. Software Product Line
    8. UML

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