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4 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
WORK
Industry needs that the scientific community test ex-
isting and new technologies, such as SMarty, identi-
fying their effectiveness in order to provide evidence
of such new technologies effectiveness allowing them
to be adopted by companies. Such evidence is essen-
tial for technology transferring, as well as for return
on investment.
The experimental study presented in this paper
demonstrates the ability to use variability manage-
ment approaches. Their effectiveness was analyzed
in order to provide a means to companies on select-
ing the most appropriate for variability management
of UML-based SPLs. The experimental study allows
analyzing the effectiveness of the SMarty and Ziadi
et al. treatments for modeling variability in sequence
diagram models. Two SPLs were set as independent
variables: a SPL for banking and the SEI AGM SPL.
The Shapiro-Wilk normality test was applied to the
samples, collected by the effectiveness formula. Both
samples were considered normal, thus it was applied
the parametric T-test. This test analyzed the effective-
ness of the Ziadi et al. and the SMarty approaches.
Then, the correlation of the subjects’ level of knowl-
edge in SPL and variability was performed based on
the Pearson technique, which shown that knowledge
had a moderate influence on the application of the
SMarty approach and a weak influence on the appli-
cation of the Ziadi et al. approach.
The obtained results provided evidence of the
SMarty effectiveness for modeling variability in UML
sequence models, taking into account the Banking
and the AGM SPLs.
This paper is limited with regard to: (i) the re-
duced sample size, which is a major issue in ex-
perimental software engineering (Kitchenham et al.,
2013); and (ii) the lack of real SPLs and industry prac-
titioners for participating in the study conduction.
New experimental studies and replications must
be planned and conducted to make it possible to
reduce the threats, increasing the effectiveness of
SMarty and generalizing the results. As new exper-
iments, we are: (i) planning a replication of this study
to corroborating the obtained results; (ii) planning an
experiment for effectiveness analysis of SMarty for
sequence models using real SPLs and practitioners
from industry; (iii) planning an external replication
which will be conducted by a different experiment
team in order to corroborate the obtained results.
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