saUML: Synchronization-adorned UML models

Introduction

Today, most new software products use concurrency in some capacity---especially in high-assurance application domains, where the trend is toward systems that are increasingly interactive and distributed. A principal difficulty in the design of such software is to safely accommodate and optimize concurrency and synchronization. While reasoning about correctness of concurrent program designs is inherently complex, we believe some difficulties could be ameliorated with the aid of more usable, graphical notations that appeal to and perhaps even enhance the cognitive capabilities of the human developer. The saUML project is concerned with the development and rigorous evaluation of such notations, starting with extensions to popular modeling notations such as UML 2.0 sequence and state diagrams.

Personnel

Publications

• Assessing the Benefits of Synchronization-Adorned Sequence Diagrams: Two Controlled Experiments
  • Authors: Shaohua Xie, Eileen T. Kraemer, R. E. K. Stirewalt, Laura K. Dillon, and Scott D. Fleming
  • To appear in Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (SOFTVIS'08)
  • Link to materials used in these studies


• Designing your Next Empirical Study on Program Comprehension
  • Authors: Massimiliano Di Penta, R. E. K. Stirewalt, and Eileen T. Kraemer
  • Appears in Proc. of the 15^th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC'07), June 2007


• Empirical Evaluation of a UML Sequence Diagram with Adornments to Support Understanding of Thread Interactions
  • Authors: Shaohua Xie, Eileen T. Kraemer, and R. E. K. Stirewalt
  • Appears in Proc. of the 15^th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC'07), June 2007


• Design and Evaluation of a Diagrammatic Notation to Aid in the Understanding of Concurrency Concepts
  • Authors: Shaohua Xie, Eileen T. Kraemer, and R. E. K. Stirewalt
  • Appears in Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'07), May 2007