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The use of UML class diagrams and its effect on code change-proneness

Published: 01 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The goal of this study is to investigate the use of UML and its impact on the change proneness of the implementation code. We look at whether the use of UML class diagrams, as opposed to using no modeling notation, influences code change proneness. Furthermore, using five design metrics we measure the quality of UML class diagrams and explore its correlation with code change proneness. Based on a UML model of an industrial system and multiple snapshots of the implementation code, we have found that at the system level the change proneness of code modeled using class diagrams is lower than that of code that is not modeled at all. However, we observe different results when performing the analysis at different system levels (e.g., subsystem and sub subsystem). Additionally, we have found significant correlations between class diagram size, complexity, and level of detail and the change proneness of the implementation code.

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  • (2019)Software Models for Source Code Maintainability: A Systematic Literature Review2019 45th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)10.1109/SEAA.2019.00047(252-259)Online publication date: Aug-2019
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  • (2017)Incremental UML for Agile Development: Embedding UML Class Models in Source Code2017 IEEE/ACM 3rd International Workshop on Rapid Continuous Software Engineering (RCoSE)10.1109/RCoSE.2017.1(27-31)Online publication date: May-2017
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  1. The use of UML class diagrams and its effect on code change-proneness

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    EESSMod '12: Proceedings of the Second Edition of the International Workshop on Experiences and Empirical Studies in Software Modelling
    October 2012
    57 pages
    ISBN:9781450318112
    DOI:10.1145/2424563
    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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    Publication History

    Published: 01 October 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. code churn
    2. quality
    3. unified modeling language

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    MODELS '12
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    EESSMod '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 9 of 18 submissions, 50%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 9 of 18 submissions, 50%

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    View all
    • (2019)Software Models for Source Code Maintainability: A Systematic Literature Review2019 45th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)10.1109/SEAA.2019.00047(252-259)Online publication date: Aug-2019
    • (2017)Incremental UML for agile developmentProceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Rapid Continuous Software Engineering10.5555/3105398.3105405(27-31)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
    • (2017)Incremental UML for Agile Development: Embedding UML Class Models in Source Code2017 IEEE/ACM 3rd International Workshop on Rapid Continuous Software Engineering (RCoSE)10.1109/RCoSE.2017.1(27-31)Online publication date: May-2017
    • (2017)Feature models for big data applications: Modeling big data applications by applying feature models2017 8th International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems & Applications (IISA)10.1109/IISA.2017.8316394(1-6)Online publication date: Aug-2017
    • (2015)Quantitative Functional Change Impact Analysis in Activity Diagrams: A COSMIC-Based ApproachSoftware Measurement10.1007/978-3-319-24285-9_6(78-95)Online publication date: 25-Dec-2015
    • (2014)Mining metrics for understanding metamodel characteristicsProceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Modeling in Software Engineering10.1145/2593770.2593774(55-60)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2014
    • (2014)Simplifying Maintenance by Application of Architectural ServicesComputational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 201410.1007/978-3-319-09156-3_34(476-491)Online publication date: 2014

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