Quality Assessment of UML Class Diagrams - A Study Comparing Experts and Students

In this paper, we present an experiment conducted for comparing how experts and students assess the quality of class diagrams. Six quality attributes were addressed: Understandability, Layout, Extensibility, Modifiability, Completeness and Correctness. From this study, we aim to find out how well students are capable of evaluating the quality of UML designs. Moreover, we aim to learn which features experts and students use for assessing the quality attributes of class diagrams. The study reveals that experts and students’ assessment of the six quality attributes differ significantly. However, a qualitative analysis of experts and students’ feedback suggests that students use similar features as experts use for assessing the quality of diagrams. Hence peer-feedback from students can be useful in educational settings.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: MODELS
• Authors: Bilal Karasneh, Dave R. Stikkolorum, Enrique Larios
• Keywords: MODELS 2015, Natural Language Processing