ComD2: Family of Techniques for Inspecting Defects in Models that Affect Team Communication

Abstract

Communication failures in software development teams can compromise the software quality. Therefore, identifying and mitigating risks for effective team communication are important activities in software development. Software models are one of the means of communication in development teams, because it communicates other members of the development team about the software. Thus, our research focuses on inspection techniques for identifying defects that affect the team communication through the software models. This paper presents a family of techniques for inspecting defects that affect team communication, called ComD2 (Communication between Designers and Developers). The ComD2 family was developed based on theories that investigate different ways of communication. For the time being, the ComD2 family has three specific inspection techniques for UML models, such as class diagrams, activity diagrams, and state machine diagrams. We performed a feasibility study and the results showed that the ComD2 family was considered useful for the identification of defects that affect the team communication through the software models.