Extending and validating gestUI using technical action research
gestUI is a model-driven method with tool support to define custom gestures and to include gesture-based interaction in existing user software system interfaces. So far, gestUI had been limited to the definition of the same gesture catalogue for all users of the software system. In this paper, we extend gestUI to permit individual users to define their own custom gesture catalogue and redefine some custom gestures in case of difficulty in using or remembering them. After extending gestUI, we applied technical action research from the FP7 CaaS project's Capability Design Tool with the aim of assessing its acceptance in an industrial setting. We also analysed its perceived ease-of-use and use…
Learning Pros and Cons of Model-Driven Development in a Practical Teaching Experience
Current teaching guides on Software Engineering degree focus mainly on teaching programming languages from the first courses. Conceptual modeling is a topic that is only taught in last courses, like master courses. At that point, many students do not see the usefulness of conceptual modeling and most of them have difficulty to reach the level of abstraction needed to work with them. In order to make the learning of conceptual modeling more attractive, we have conducted an experience where students compare a traditional development versus a development using conceptual models through a Model-Driven Development (MDD) method. This way, students can check on their own pros and cons of working w…
Evaluating Model-Driven Development Claims with Respect to Quality: A Family of Experiments
[EN] Context: There is a lack of empirical evidence on the differences between model-driven development (MDD), where code is automatically derived from conceptual models, and traditional software development method, where code is manually written. In our previous work, we compared both methods in a baseline experiment concluding that quality of the software developed following MDD was significantly better only for more complex problems (with more function points). Quality was measured through test cases run on a functional system. Objective: This paper reports six replications of the baseline to study the impact of problem complexity on software quality in the context of MDD. Method: We con…
In Search of Evidence for Model-Driven Development Claims: An Experiment on Quality, Effort, Productivity and Satisfaction
Context: Model-Driven Development (MDD) is a paradigm that prescribes building conceptual models that abstractly represent the system and generating code from these models through transformation rules. The literature is rife with claims about the benefits of MDD, but they are hardly supported by evidences. Objective: This experimental investigation aims to verify some of the most cited benefits of MDD. Method: We run an experiment on a small set of classes using student subjects to compare the quality, effort, productivity and satisfaction of traditional development and MDD. The experiment participants built two web applications from scratch, one where the developers implement the code by h…
An empirical comparative evaluation of gestUI to include gesture-based interaction in user interfaces
[EN] Currently there are tools that support the customisation of users' gestures. In general, the inclusion of new gestures implies writing new lines of code that strongly depend on the target platform where the system is run. In order to avoid this platform dependency, gestUI was proposed as a model-driven method that permits (i) the definition of custom touch-based gestures, and (ii) the inclusion of the gesture-based interaction in existing user interfaces on desktop computing platforms. The objective of this work is to compare gestUI (a MDD method to deal with gestures) versus a code-centric method to include gesture-based interaction in user interfaces. In order to perform the comparis…