Teaching software modeling in computing curricula

Börstler, Jürgen; Kuźniarz, Ludwik; Alphonce, Carl; Sanders, William B.; Śmiałek, Michał

doi:10.1145/2426636.2426640

Cited by 11 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 21 publications

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“…Software design is the only way to accurately materialize customer requirements, and actually there are guidelines and recommendations [5], [6] for object-oriented software design that designers, generally beginners, fail to implement in practice. As a result, designers have great difficulty in finding good decisions, which leads to the violation of the principles of the object-oriented approach, which results in low-quality designs [7]- [9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying Difficulties of Software Modeling Through Class Diagrams: A Long-Term Comparative Analysis

2022

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Software modeling is a creative activity in which software components and their relationships are identified based on customer requirements. Based on the literature, object-oriented software modeling is based on four fundamental pillars which are abstraction, encapsulation, decomposition, and inheritance. However, despite the existence of guidelines and recommendations for implementing the object-oriented approach, novice software designers do not make good design decisions, leading to inefficient designs that cannot be modifiable, understandable, or user-friendly distribute at the development level. The literature reveals that the most common difficulties faced by software designers is a lack of understanding and confusion of concepts related to the object-oriented approach, as well as difficulties in creating Unified Modeling Language diagrams, especially class diagrams. The work presented in this article uses a qualitative and quantitative approach to determine, in a group of university students, what are the most recurrent difficulties and their persistence during the time. The qualitative case study is the method that allowed to generate the documents: diagnostic and evaluation tests. Additionally, a thematic analysis was used to identify, analyze and report patterns within the data. In order to know the occurrences of the problems in the case study, as part of our quantitative approach, a comparative study was applied to compare the results obtained between the diagnostic and evaluation tests and thus establish the similarities and differences among the cases observed, through the hierarchical clustering technique. The findings of this study show us 16 difficulties identified after the qualitative analysis, while the quantitative analysis shows us the number of occurrences and their persistence over time. The difficulties reported in both analyzes focus on these three difficulties: a) Definition of attributes that could be a class, b) Classes with inadequate or insufficient behavior and, c) Incorrect use of multiplicity between classes. Each of these difficulties is analyzed in depth in this study.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%