Towards to Transfer the Directives of Communicability to Software Projects: Qualitative Studies

Authors

  • Adriana Lopes Damian Federal University of Amazonas
  • Edna Dias Canedo University of Brasília
  • Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
  • Tayana Conte Federal University of Amazonas

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5753/jserd.2021.1942

Keywords:

Communication via Software Artifacts, Human‑Centered Computing, Semiotic Engineering

Abstract

The software artifacts developed in the early stages of the development process describe the proposed solutions for the software. For this reason, these artifacts are commonly used to support communication among members of the development team. Miscommunication through software artifacts occurs because practitioners typically focus on their modeling, without reflecting on how other software development team members interpret them. In this context, we proposed the Directives of Communicability (DCs) to support practitioners analyzing characteristics that affect the artifact’s content on communication via artifact. We conducted preliminary studies in a controlled environment with our proposal. However, we noticed that new studies are necessary to evaluate the DCs concerning practitioners’ perceptions before transferring them to the industry. In this paper, we present two studies performed aiming to transfer the DCs to the software industry. In the first study, we evaluated the practitioners’ perception about the DCs. In the second study, we evaluated the feasibility of the DCs in a software development team. The studies’ results indicated that DCs have the potential to support improvements in artifacts’ content to reduce miscommunication via artifact. To facilitate the use of our proposal in the software industry, we created procedures that support the adoption of the DCs and checklists for the application of each directive in the software artifacts. We noticed positive perceptions of practitioners about the application of DCs in software artifacts. We hope that our contribution support software development teams that use artifacts in your projects.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Brambilla, M., & Fraternali, P. (2014). Interaction flow modeling language: Model-driven UI engineering of web and mobile apps with IFML. Morgan Kaufmann.

Bordin, S., & De Angeli, A. (2016). Focal Points for a more User-Centered Agile Development. International Conference on Agile Software Development, 3-15.

Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (2014). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Sage publications.

De Souza, C. S. (2005). The semiotic engineering of human-computer interaction. MIT press.

De Souza, C. S., Cerqueira, R. D. G., Afonso, L. M., Brandão, R. D. M., & Ferreira, J. S. J. (2016). Software De-velopers as Users. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Freire, E. S. S., Oliveira, G. C., & de Sousa Gomes, M. E. (2018). Analysis of open-source CASE tools for supporting software modeling process with UML. In Proceedings of the 17th Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality, 51-60.

Granda, M. F., Condori-Fernández, N., Vos, T. E., & Pastor, O. (2015). What do we know about the defect types detected in conceptual models? In 2015 IEEE 9th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS), 88-99.

Grice, Herbert P. Logic and conversation. Speech acts. Brill, 1975. 41-58.

Jakobson, R. (1960). Linguistics and poetics. In Style in language. MA: MIT Press, 350-377.

Käfer, V. (2017). Summarizing software engineering communication artifacts from different sources. In Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering, 1038-1041.

Likert, R. (1932). A Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes. Archives of Psychology, 144 (55), 7-10.

Lopes, A., Oliveira, E., Conte, T., & de Souza, C. S. (2019a). Directives of communicability: towards better com-munication through software models. In 2019 IEEE/ACM 12th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), 45-48.

Lopes, A., Conte, T., & de Souza, C. S. (2019b). Reducing the risks of communication failures through software models. In Proceedings of the 18th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-10.

Lopes, A., Conte, T., & de Souza, C. S. (2020). Exploring the Directives of Communicability for Improving the Quality of Software Artifacts. In Proceedings of the XIX Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality (SBQS’20), 10 pages.

Lopes, A., Conte, T., & de Souza, C. S. (2021). Directives of Communicability: Towards Software Development Teams. USES Research Group Technical Report, TR-USES-2021-01. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15057984.v2

Marangunić, N., & Granić, A. (2015). Technology acceptance model: a literature review from 1986 to 2013. Universal access in the information society, 14(1), 81-95.

OMG. (2011). Business process model and notation (BPMN) version 2.0. Object Management Group, 1(4).

OMG. (2015). Unified Modeling Language TM (UML) Version 2.5.

Petre, M. (2013). UML in practice. In Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013), 722-731.

Khare, R., & Taylor, R. N. (2004). Extending the representational state transfer (rest) architectural style for decentralized systems. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, 428-437.

Sebe, N. (2010). Human-centered computing. In Handbook of ambient intelligence and smart environments, Springer, Boston, MA, 349-370.

Schoonewille, H. H., Heijstek, W., Chaudron, M. R., & Kühne, T. (2011). A cognitive perspective on developer comprehension of software design documentation. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM international conference on Design of communication, 211-218.

Tilley, S. (2009). Documenting software systems with views VI: lessons learned from 15 years of research & practice. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on Design of communication, 239-244.

Venkatesh, V., & Bala, H. (2008). Technology acceptance model 3 and a research agenda on interventions. Decision sciences, 39(2), 273-315.

Wohlin, C., Runeson, P., Höst, M., Ohlsson, M. C., Reg-nell, B., & Wesslén, A. (2012). Experimentation in software engineering. Springer Science & Business Media.

Downloads

Published

2021-11-03

How to Cite

Damian, A. L., Dias Canedo, E., Sieckenius de Souza, C., & Conte, T. (2021). Towards to Transfer the Directives of Communicability to Software Projects: Qualitative Studies. Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development, 9(1), 13:1 – 13:15. https://doi.org/10.5753/jserd.2021.1942

Issue

Section

Research Article