An Empirical Study on the Anticipation of the Result of Copying and Pasting among UML Editors

  • Daniel Liabeuf
  • Xavier Le Pallec
  • José Rouillard
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 8769)

Abstract

Copy and paste is a function that is very popular in software programming. In software modeling, when a person performs a copy and paste, she/he expects that the copy will be similar to the original. The similarity refers to a selection of what properties and references from the original element have to be copied. This problem seems difficult because this feature is not addressed in scientific literature, is rarely available in — de-facto standard — editors of UML class diagram or functions differently from one editor to another. In this article, we will show that a significant part of the solution depends on the metrics used. We propose three families of metrics that produce various copy and paste behaviors. We adopted an empirical approach to assess their ergonomic qualities. We asked 67 people to predict results of a series of copy-pasting experiments. We observed two populations, one influenced by the visual representation and the other by semantics.

Keywords

Copy and paste Diagram editor Empirical study 
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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  • Daniel Liabeuf
    • 1
  • Xavier Le Pallec
    • 1
  • José Rouillard
    • 1
  1. 1.Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale de LilleUniversité de Lille 1Villeneuve d’Ascq CédexFrance

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