Using Practitioners for Assessing the Understandability of UML Statechart Diagrams with Composite States

We have carried out a family of empirical studies to investigate whether the use of composite states improves the understandability of UML statechart diagrams. Our hypothesis derived from conventional wisdom, which says that hierarchical modeling mechanisms are helpful to master a system's complexity. We carried out three studies that have gradually evolved in the size of the UML statechart models, the type of subjects (students vs. professionals), the familiarity of the subjects with the domains of the diagrams, and other factors. In this work we briefly review the first and second studies and present the third one, performed with practitioners as experimental subjects. Surprisingly, our results do not seem to show that the use of composite states improves the understandability of UML statechart diagrams.

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