RapMOD — In Situ Auto-Completion for Graphical Models

Auto-completion of textual inputs benefits software developers using IDEs. However, graphical modeling tools used to design software do not yet provide such functionality. The challenges of recommending auto-completions for graphical modeling activities are largely unexplored. Recommending such auto-completions requires detecting meaningful partly completed activities, tolerating variance in user actions, and determining the most relevant activities that a user wants to perform. We propose RapMOD, an approach that works in the background while a developer is creating or evolving models and handles all these challenges. Users' editing operations are analyzed and matched to a predefined but extensible catalog of common modeling activities for structural UML models. We found RapMOD to significantly reduce modeling effort.