![](bg8.png)
SMarty mechanism to trace variabilities from a higher
abstraction level diagram (class) to a lower level dia-
gram (sequence) by means of the <<variability>>
attribute realizes-. However, it seems there were
certain issues making it difficult to a small portion
(13.33%) of the participants to trace variabilities.
With regard to sequence to class diagrams,
73.3% of participants agree with SMarty support at
identifying and tracing the impacts at the class dia-
gram level when changes are made at the sequence
level. Again, the majority of participants really com-
prehend the SMarty mechanism to trace variabilities
from a lower abstraction level diagram (sequence)
to a higher level diagram (class) by means of the
<<variability>> attribute realizes+.
Unfortunately, for the traceability analysis, we did
not ask any open questions to participants to express
their thoughts on it, because we did not want to extend
the time for the participation in the experiment, thus
causing more fatigue threats.
5 CONCLUSION
Regarding the first research question, the results on
the effectiveness at configuring products showed an
advantage of SMarty in relation to Ziadi et al. for
both class and sequence diagrams.
We provide evidence the previous knowledge of
the participant in SPL, variability and UML may be
related to the effectiveness of Ziadi et al. to product
configuration. Especially for SMarty, the knowledge
seems not to determine such effectiveness, thus de-
manding less experienced participants.
With regard to the third research question, we un-
derstand SMarty provides subsidies for traceability
of variability-related elements in both class and se-
quence diagrams. However, this aspect still needs to
be improved. Ziadi, on the other hand, cannot be eval-
uated for not providing support for traceability of ele-
ments.
As future work we are developing an automated
tool to UML-based approaches which takes as a basis
any profile from the UML metamodel.
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