Conference paper (in proceedings)

Capturing and understanding the drift between design, implementation, and documentation

  • Romeo, Joseph ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Raglianti, Marco ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Nagy, Csaba ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Lanza, Michele ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
Show more…
  • 2024
Published in:
  • Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC '24). - 2024, p. 382–386
English UML artifacts constitute a key (but often neglected) asset supporting the comprehension of a system. Design documents "bind" developers in implementation phases and close the loop as documentation of the implemented system itself. Nevertheless, the intended system (design), its current version (implementation), and its documentation, naturally tend to drift apart, negatively impacting the usefulness of UML diagrams contained in such artifacts. We present a novel approach to capture and understand the Design-Implementation-Documentation (DID) drift. We connect UML references in human-readable text-based UML formats (e.g., PlantUML) to the corresponding source code entities (e.g., Java classes), implementing novel metrics to capture the UML coverage of the system. We analyze project and file coverage evolution across releases and commits, with overall, method-level, and attributelevel detailedness, showing how they support DID drift analysis. We present interesting case studies exemplifying how through Drifter, the visual exploration tool we developed to validate our approach, we identify DID drift and ways to tackle it in the future.
Collections
Language
  • English
Classification
Computer science and technology
License
License undefined
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1329459
Statistics

Document views: 3 File downloads:
  • Romeo_2024_ACM_ICPC.pdf: 1