Abstract
The software artifacts developed in the early stages of the development process describe the proposed solutions for the software. For this reason, these artifacts are commonly used to support communication among members of the development team. Miscommunication through software artifacts occurs because practitioners typically focus on their modeling, without reflecting on how other software development team members interpret them. In this context, we proposed the Directives of Communicability (DCs) to support practitioners analyzing characteristics that affect the artifact’s content on communication via artifact. We conducted preliminary studies in a controlled environment with our proposal. However, we noticed that new studies are necessary to evaluate the DCs concerning practitioners’ perceptions before transferring them to the industry. In this paper, we present two studies performed aiming to transfer the DCs to the software industry. In the first study, we evaluated the practitioners’ perception about the DCs. In the second study, we evaluated the feasibility of the DCs in a software development team. The studies’ results indicated that DCs have the potential to support improvements in artifacts’ content to reduce miscommunication via artifact. To facilitate the use of our proposal in the software industry, we created procedures that support the adoption of the DCs and checklists for the application of each directive in the software artifacts. We noticed positive perceptions of practitioners about the application of DCs in software artifacts. We hope that our contribution support software development teams that use artifacts in your projects.
Highlights
Artifacts developed in the early stages of the software development process, such as the different diagrams of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) (Freire et al, 2018; OMG, 2015), assist practitioners in understanding the problem for which software was required
The results demonstrated that the UML use cases developed, with the support of Directives of Communicability 1 (DCs), had few risks of miscommunication
The results obtained in this study may not be reproduced in other software artifacts that support the understanding of members of a team
Summary
Artifacts developed in the early stages of the software development process, such as the different diagrams of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) (Freire et al, 2018; OMG, 2015), assist practitioners in understanding the problem for which software was required. As proposed solutions for software development are in artifacts, these artifacts support team communication (Petre, 2013). Communication is considered an important factor in software development, since miscommunication in software teams causes low productivity and software failures (Käfer, 2017). Miscommunication via artifact occurs, for example, when consumers (who take the information they see in the models for the development of another artifact) have different interpretations from the ones intended by the producers (who conceive the modeling of the software). As much as consumers know the modeling notation, the way the modeling has been expressed by their producer can affect these practitioners’ mutual understanding. The DCs ca n support reflections to producers a bout how they ca n crea te a softwa re solution via artifacts aimed to get a mutual understanding among development team members
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