Software engineering whispers: The effect of textual vs. graphical software design descriptions on software design communication
Journal article, 2020
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.
Family of experiments
Software modeling
UML
Software design
Knowledge sharing
Graphical representation
Textual representation
Software engineering
Communication
Author
Rodi Jolak
Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)
University of Gothenburg
Maxime Savary-Leblanc
University of Lille
Manuela Dalibor
RWTH Aachen University
Andreas Wortmann
RWTH Aachen University
Regina Hebig
University of Gothenburg
Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)
Juraj Vincur
Slovak University of Technology Bratislava
Ivan Polasek
Slovak University of Technology Bratislava
Xavier Le Pallec
University of Lille
Sebastien Gerard
The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA)
Michel Chaudron
Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)
University of Gothenburg
Empirical Software Engineering
1382-3256 (ISSN) 1573-7616 (eISSN)
Vol. 25 6 4427-4471Subject Categories (SSIF 2011)
Software Engineering
DOI
10.1007/s10664-020-09835-6