Dave R. Stikkolorum

The relevance of model-driven engineering thirty years from now

Although model-driven engineering (MDE) is now an established approach for developing complex software systems, it has not been universally adopted by the software industry. In order to better understand the reasons for this, as well as to identify future opportunities for MDE, we carried out a week-long design thinking experiment with 15 MDE experts. Participants were facilitated to identify the biggest problems with current MDE technologies, to identify grand challenges for society in the near future, and to identify ways that MDE could help to address these challenges. The outcome is a reflection of the current strengths of MDE, an outlook of the most pressing challenges for society at large over the next three decades, and an analysis of key future MDE research opportunities.

UML class diagram simplification: what is in the developer's mind?

Class diagrams play an important role in software development. However, in some cases, these diagrams contain a lot of information. This makes it hard for software maintainers to use them to understand a system. In this paper, we aim to discover how to simplify class diagrams in a such way that they make systems easier to understand. To this end, we performed a survey to analyze what type of information software developers find important to include or exclude in order to simplify a class diagram. This survey involved 32 software developers with 75% of the participants having more than 5 years of experience with class diagrams. As the result, we found that the important elements in a class diagram are class relationship, meaningful class names and class properties. We also found that information that should be excluded in a simplified class diagram is GUI related information, private and protected operations, helper classes and library classes. In this survey we also tried to discover what types of features are needed for class diagram simplification tools.

A Workshop for Integrating UML Modelling and Agile Development in the Classroom

Students have various difficulties with software modelling, the software development process and with positioning modelling as a means to support their software development. The Agile methodology Scrum has gained popularity in industry and also amongst students. Unfortunately agile projects often lack adequate documentation. Modelling and the agile process could complement each other. The combination of modelling and agile development is not often used in education. Based on our positive experience with the interactive LEGO4SCRUM workshop we use in our programs, we propose an approach based on this workshop that integrates UML modelling into the Scrum process. The workshop lets students experience a whole development cycle from a modelling perspective. Besides this new approach we also categorized comments students wrote down based on their discussions with their peers. We evaluated the workshop with a questionnaire. The students react positive on the approach and indicate they have gained new insights. This paper explains the workshop set-up, presents its evaluation and discusses the results.