Unlocking Diagram Understanding: Empowering End-Users for Semantically Transparent Visual Symbols

Défense de thèse de Nicolas Genon

One of the major challenges in software engineering is to develop adequate software that effectively tackles business requirements. In this context, an effective communication between stakeholders and software developers is essential.
The quest for appropriate software brought out several software engineering methodologies, among which the model-driven engineering. Model-driven engineering, and more generally software engineering, have not dedicated so many research efforts to the challenge of effective communication with stakeholders. Languages’ advances have largely been centred on defining a precise semantics and a well-formed abstract syntax.
In this dissertation, we investigate how SE models can be improved in order to ease the communication between software engineers and business stakeholders. Most of the software engineering models are represented as graphs, with nodes and edges. Our work focusses on making these nodes semantically transparent, that is to ensure that their appearance suggests their meaning. To achieve this objective, we embrace the Web 2.0 philosophy by empowering the end-users of the notation in the design process of the notation symbols. More precisely, we define a method consisting of a series of empirical studies to get end-users design and evaluate the most semantically transparent for the i* goal modelling language. Hence, we provide not only such a structured method, but also a new set of semantically transparent i* symbols.

Contact : Isabelle Daelman - 4966 - isabelle.daelman@unamur.be
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