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

Romeo, Joseph; Raglianti, Marco; Nagy, Csaba; Lanza, Michele

doi:10.1145/3643916.3644399

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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

2024

Published in:

Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC '24). - 2024, p. 382–386

Design implementation documentation drift

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.

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