A Survey of the Practice of Design -- Code Correspondence amongst Professional Software Engineers

Correspondence between the design and the code of a system is desirable for several purposes in software development, such as predicting properties of the system based on the design, and for using the documentation for understanding and maintaining the system. In this paper we report on a study into the correspondence between the design of a software system, represented by means of UML, and the implementation of the system. We performed a web-based questionnaire among professional software engineers for finding out how they deal with correspondence. The questionnaire elicited the attitude of professional software engineers with respect to: importance of correspondence, common practice in maintaining correspondence and common reasons for deterioration of correspondence. The results of the questionnaire provide a deeper understanding of the aspects of correspondence and their importance in practical software engineering.