Abstract
Modeling tools are well established in software development. A model is the result of a series of modeling activities. The ability to recognize when a user is working on a certain modeling activity opens up a range of possibilities for context-sensitive support. One possible way to support the user is offering the auto-completion of the current task. The recognition of modeling activities is typically carried out by matching event patterns against events emitted by a user’s editing operations. A user that intends to add or customize auto-completions must be able to easily understand and create activity definitions. However, defining the currently required complex event patterns is a challenging and error-prone task even for a person with an intensive knowledge of event-processing languages. In this paper, we propose the visual definition language VisPaRec accompanied by a method that allows creating activity definitions in a semi-automated and graphical way. We evaluate our visual definition language in a comparative user study against the generic event-processing language Rapide. We found that the proposed visual representation increases comprehensibility while reducing time for constructing and modifying activity definitions significantly.
Highlights
Automating repetitive tasks in software engineering processes has become essential for developers
This paper presents the visual language VisPaRec accompanied by a definition method allowing non-Complex event processing (CEP)-experts to create and maintain activity definitions in a semi-automated way
None of them provides a desirable solution to the problem of specifying event-processing rules in the context of modeling activity recognition
Summary
Automating repetitive tasks in software engineering processes has become essential for developers. Software developers, experts and novices alike, benefit from simple automations like auto-completion in an IDE [1]. Researchers demonstrated that automation can be beneficial for graphical modeling tasks as well [2,3,4,5]. The recognition of these activities is not a trivial task since they include a number of different, related editing operations. Complex event processing (CEP) [6] allows for the recognition of such activities and is the technology we apply for this and previous work.
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