Empirical Evaluation of Effort on Composing Design Models

📝 Abstract

Model composition plays a central role in many software engineering activities such as evolving models to add new features and reconciling conflicting design models developed in parallel by different development teams. As model composition is usually an error-prone and effort-consuming task, its potential benefits, such as gains in productivity can be compromised. However, there is no empirical knowledge nowadays about the effort required to compose design models. Only feedbacks of model composition evangelists are available, and they often diverge. Consequently, developers are unable to conduct any cost-effectiveness analysis as well as identify, predict, or reduce composition effort. The inability of evaluating composition effort is due to three key problems. First, the current evaluation frameworks do not consider fundamental concepts in model composition such as conflicts and inconsistencies. Second, researchers and developers do not know what factors can influence the composition effort in practice. Third, practical knowledge about how such influential factors may affect the developers’ effort is severely lacking. In this context, the contributions of this thesis are threefold: (i) a quality model for supporting the evaluation of model composition effort, (ii) practical knowledge, derived from a family of quantitative and qualitative empirical studies, about model composition effort and its influential factors, and (iii) insight about how to evaluate model composition efforts and tame the side effects of such influential factors.

💡 Analysis

Model composition plays a central role in many software engineering activities such as evolving models to add new features and reconciling conflicting design models developed in parallel by different development teams. As model composition is usually an error-prone and effort-consuming task, its potential benefits, such as gains in productivity can be compromised. However, there is no empirical knowledge nowadays about the effort required to compose design models. Only feedbacks of model composition evangelists are available, and they often diverge. Consequently, developers are unable to conduct any cost-effectiveness analysis as well as identify, predict, or reduce composition effort. The inability of evaluating composition effort is due to three key problems. First, the current evaluation frameworks do not consider fundamental concepts in model composition such as conflicts and inconsistencies. Second, researchers and developers do not know what factors can influence the composition effort in practice. Third, practical knowledge about how such influential factors may affect the developers’ effort is severely lacking. In this context, the contributions of this thesis are threefold: (i) a quality model for supporting the evaluation of model composition effort, (ii) practical knowledge, derived from a family of quantitative and qualitative empirical studies, about model composition effort and its influential factors, and (iii) insight about how to evaluate model composition efforts and tame the side effects of such influential factors.

📄 Content

Kleinner Silva Farias de Oliveira Empirical Evaluation of Effort on Composing Design Models

TESE DE DOUTORADO

Thesis presented to the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Informática of the Departamento de Informática, PUC-Rio as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doutor em Informática

Advisor: Prof. Alessandro Garcia
Co-Advisor: Prof. Carlos José Pereira de Lucena

Rio de Janeiro March 2012

PUC-Rio - Certificação Digital Nº 0821407/CB

Kleinner Silva Farias de Oliveira

Empirical Evaluation of Effort on Composing Design Models

Thesis presented to the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Informática, of the Departamento de Informática do Centro Técnico Científico da PUC-Rio, as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doutor.

Prof. Alessandro Garcia Advisor Departamento de Informática – PUC-Rio

Prof. Carlos José Pereira de Lucena Co-Advisor Departamento de Informática – PUC-Rio

Prof. Arndt von Staa Departamento de Informática – PUC-Rio

Profª. Karin Koogan Breitman Departamento de Informática – PUC-Rio

Prof. Toacy Cavalcante de Oliveira Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – UFRJ

Profª. Christina von Flach Garcia Chavez Universidade Federal da Bahia – UFBA

Prof. José Eugenio Leal Coordinator of the Centro Técnico Científico da PUC-Rio

Rio de Janeiro, 21 March 2012 PUC-Rio - Certificação Digital Nº 0821407/CB All rights reserved

Kleinner Silva Farias de Oliveira

He received his BSc in Computer Science from the Federal University of Alagoas in 2006 and in Information Technology from the Federal Institute of Alagoas in 2006. He received his MSc in Computer Science from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in 2008.

Bibliographic data

CDD: 004

Oliveira, Kleinner Silva Farias de

  Empirical evaluation of effort on composing design models / 

Kleinner Silva Farias de Oliveira ; supervisor: Alessandro Garcia ; co-supervisor: Carlos José Pereira de Lucena. – 2012.

  282f. : il. (color.) ; 30 cm 
   
  Tese (doutorado)–Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de 

Janeiro, Departamento de Informática, 2012.

   Inclui bibliografia 
    
   1. Informática – Teses.  2. Estudos empíricos. 3. Design de 

software. 4. Modelagem de software. 5. Métricos de software. I. Garcia, Alessandro. II. Lucena, Carlos José Pereira de. III. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. Departamento de Informática. IV. Título. PUC-Rio - Certificação Digital Nº 0821407/CB

                                                                                               To my family 

PUC-Rio - Certificação Digital Nº 0821407/CB Acknowledgments

I am honored and grateful to have counted with excellent professionals along the way of this work. Especially, I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Alessandro Garcia, who provided constant encouragement, guidance, and freedom to develop this thesis. His competent and constructive criticism was essential to my success, my sincere admiration to him. I am very grateful to have Prof. Dr. Carlos Lucena as one of my supervisors. I would like to thank him for all support on my research path by guiding me with his extensive knowledge, providing advice, and encouragement in the early stages.
I am indebted to Jon Whittle (Lancaster University, UK) for his in-depth
reviews of many papers, and numerous interesting discussions and suggestions about the critical points throughout this work, lending a sense of reality to the research being conducted. I received so much from him to enlarge my vision on software engineering.
I could not forget to thank Dr. Toacy Oliveira, who trusted me fully from the beginning of my research career. Thanks to his mentoring, friendship, and all frequent discussions that help me to guide my professional life. My gratefulness also goes to all my colleagues and professors from the Computer Science Department at PUC-Rio, especially to my friends from the Software Engineering Laboratory (LES) who gave me opportunities to grow as professional putting my ideas into action. It has been a privilege working on that stimulating environment. During the development of this work, I was lucky to have collaborated with a number of research colleagues who contributed to this thesis in different ways and who allowed me to collaborate with their works as well. It was a pleasure to work with all of them on a number of papers. PUC-Rio - Certificação Digital Nº 0821407/CB I am also thankful to the members of my examination committee, who has generously contributed their tim

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