An experiment to observe the impact of UML diagrams on the effectiveness of software requirements inspections

Author

Albayrak, Özlem

Author_Institution

Comput. Technol. & Inf. Syst., Bilkent Univ., Ankara, Turkey

fYear

2009

fDate

15-16 Oct. 2009

Firstpage

506

Lastpage

510

Abstract

Software inspections aim to find defects early in the development process and studies have found them to be effective. However, there is almost no data available regarding the impact of UML diagram utilization in software requirements specification documents on inspection effectiveness. This paper addresses this issue by investigating whether inclusion of UML diagrams impacts the effectiveness of requirements inspection. We conducted an experiment in an academic environment with 35 subjects to empirically investigate the impact of UML diagram inclusion on requirements inspections´ effectiveness and the number of reported defects. The results show that including UML diagrams in requirements specification document significantly impacts the number of reported defects, and there is no significant impact on the effectiveness of individual inspections.

Keywords

Unified Modeling Language; formal specification; object-oriented methods; quality assurance; software quality; UML diagram; Unified Modeling Language; defect detection; development process; object-oriented concept; software quality assurance; software requirement inspection; software requirement specification document; Information systems; Inspection; Object oriented modeling; Particle measurements; Quality assurance; Software engineering; Software measurement; Software quality; Software tools; Unified modeling language;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, 2009. ESEM 2009. 3rd International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Lake Buena Vista, FL

ISSN

1938-6451

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-4842-5

Electronic_ISBN

1938-6451

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ESEM.2009.5314229

Filename

5314229