EVALUATION OF UML IN PRACTICE - Experiences in a Traffic Management Systems Company

Michel dos Santos Soares, Jos Vrancken

2009

Abstract

This article is about research performed by the authors into improving the Software Engineering process at an company that develops software-intensive systems. The company develops road traffic management systems using the object-oriented paradigm, and UML as the visual modeling language. Our hypothesis is that UML has some difficulties/drawbacks in certain system development phases and activities. Many of these problems were reported in the literature normally after applying UML to one project and/or studying the language’s formal specifications and comparing with other languages. Unfortunately, few publications are based on surveys and interviews with practitioners, i.e., the developers and project managers that are using UML in real projects and are frequently facing these problems. As a matter of fact, some relevant questions were not fully addressed in past research, mainly related to UML problems in practice. The purpose of this text is to report the main findings and the proposed improvements based on other methods/languages, or even considering UML diagrams that are not often used. The research methodology involved surveys, interviews and action research with a system developed in order to implement the recommendations and evaluate the proposed improvements. The recommendations were considered feasible, as they are not proposing to radically change the current situation, which would involve higher costs and risks.

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

dos Santos Soares M. and Vrancken J. (2009). EVALUATION OF UML IN PRACTICE - Experiences in a Traffic Management Systems Company . In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-8111-86-9, pages 313-319. DOI: 10.5220/0001850903130319


in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis09,
author={Michel dos Santos Soares and Jos Vrancken},
title={EVALUATION OF UML IN PRACTICE - Experiences in a Traffic Management Systems Company},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,},
year={2009},
pages={313-319},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001850903130319},
isbn={978-989-8111-86-9},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,
TI - EVALUATION OF UML IN PRACTICE - Experiences in a Traffic Management Systems Company
SN - 978-989-8111-86-9
AU - dos Santos Soares M.
AU - Vrancken J.
PY - 2009
SP - 313
EP - 319
DO - 10.5220/0001850903130319