Supporting task-oriented modeling using interactive UML views

The UML is a collection of 13 diagram notations to describe different views of a software system. The existing diagram types display model elements and their relations. Software engineering is becoming more and more model-centric, such that software engineers start using UML models for more tasks than just describing the system. Tasks such as analysis or prediction of system properties require additional information such as metrics of the UML model or from external sources, e.g. a version control system. In this paper we identify tasks of model-centric software engineering and information that is required to fulfill these tasks. We propose views to visualize the information to support fulfilling the tasks. This paper reports on a large-scale controlled experiment to validate the usefulness of the proposed views that are implemented in our MetricView Evolution tool. The results of the experiment with 100 participants are statistically significant and show that the correctness of comprehension is improved by 4.5% and that the time needed is reduced by 20%.