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Context Software engineering is a social and collaborative activity. Communicating and sharing knowledge between software developers requires much effort. Hence, the quality of communication plays an important role in influencing project success. To better understand the effect of communication on project success, more in-depth empirical studies investigating this phenomenon are needed. Objective We investigate the effect of using a graphical versus textual design description on co-located software design communication. Method Therefore, we conducted a family of experiments involving a mix of 240 software engineering students from four universities. We examined how different design representations (i.e., graphical vs. textual) affect the ability to Explain, Understand, Recall, and Actively Communicate knowledge. Results We found that the graphical design description is better than the textual in promoting Active Discussion between developers and improving the Recall of design details. Furthermore, compared to its unaltered version, a well-organized and motivated textual design description–that is used for the same amount of time–enhances the recall of design details and increases the amount of active discussions at the cost of reducing the perceived quality of explaining.

Gamification refers to the exploitation of gaming mechanisms for serious purposes, like learning hard-to-train skills such as modeling. We present a gamified version of Papyrus, the well-known open source modeling tool. Instructors can use it to easily create new modeling games (including the tasks, solutions, levels, rewards...) to help students learning any specific modeling aspect. The evaluation of the game components is delegated to the GDF gamification framework that bidirectionally communicates with the Papyrus core via API calls. Our gamified Papyrus includes as well a game dashboard component implemented with HTML/CSS/-Javascript and displayed thanks to the integration of a web browser embedded in an Eclipse view. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software design engineering; • Applied computing → Education;

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This paper explores the understudied field of conceptual modeling assistance. More specifically, we focused on the design and application of recommender systems as software assistants for conceptual modeling. Prior work on such systems has shown that trust plays a key role in the acceptance and exploitation of such systems. Consequently, as a starting point of our research, we applied established methods for constructing multi-criteria recommender systems (MCRS) to conceptual modeling in a way which could foster the emergence of trust. Finally, we chose supervised-learning techniques to refine and customize the recommendations generated by these systems. To help us determine the feasibility and practicality of our approach, we designed and implemented a prototype system that assists conceptual modeling with UML. Our system currently recommends class attributes when constructing UML class diagrams. A preliminary evaluation of this tool indicated a strong match between the recommendations provided by our system and personal choices made by the participants.