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FlexiSketch: a lightweight sketching and metamodeling approach for end-users

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Abstract

Engineers commonly use paper and whiteboards to sketch and discuss ideas in early phases of requirements elicitation and software modeling. These physical media foster creativity because they are quick to use and do not restrict in any way the form in which content can be drawn. If the sketched information needs to be reused later on, however, engineers have to spend extra effort for preserving the information in a form that can be processed by a software modeling tool. While saving information in a machine-readable way comes for free with formal software modeling tools, they typically anticipate the use of specific, predefined modeling languages and therefore hamper creativity. To combine the advantages of informal and formal tools, we have developed a flexible tool-supported modeling approach that augments a sketching environment with lightweight metamodeling capabilities. Users can create their own modeling languages by defining sketched constructs on demand and export model sketches as semiformal models. In this article, we first give an overview of FlexiSketch and then focus on an evaluation of our approach with two studies conducted with both novice modelers and experienced practitioners. Our goal was to find out how well modelers manage to use our lightweight metamodeling mechanisms, and how they build notations collaboratively. Results show that experienced modelers adopt our approach quickly, while novices have difficulties to distinguish between the model and metamodel levels and would benefit from additional guidance and user awareness features. The lessons learned from our studies can serve as advice for similar flexible modeling approaches.

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Notes

  1. Since in our case the motivation for performing (“just enough”) metamodeling is to formalize sketches rather than defining high-quality modeling languages, it does not make sense to compare the quality of the created metamodels with those built by metamodeling experts at this stage. However, a future study about metamodel quality could help to improve the generated metamodels and thus enhance the reusability of FlexiSketch artifacts.

  2. Results of an earlier study have shown that node-and-edge diagrams are among the most frequently used diagram types in early requirements elicitation and design sessions [59].

  3. In the next tool version, the user will be able to see a list of all graphical representations for a type and to manage them. This will allow the user to delete a representation, to choose which representation should be used for the drag and drop mechanism, and to replace all symbols with a particular type on the sketch canvas with one of the representations in the list.

  4. A demo video of the FlexiSketch tool is available at http://youtu.be/0kHjNfHLViM.

  5. The handouts and survey for the student groups are available at https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/rerg/flexisketch/StudentHandouts.pdf.

  6. The members of PG1 picked a task from one of their companies and turned it into a more general problem to which all group members could relate to.

  7. Choosing a GUI enabled us to also evaluate the fitness of our tool for diagram types that consist of containment relationships rather than nodes and edges, while it still allowed us to observe how students collaboratively define a modeling notation.

  8. The full diagrams can be found in high resolution at https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/rerg/flexisketch/TeamResults.pdf.

  9. https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/rerg/flexisketch/Handouts.pdf.

  10. https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/rerg/flexisketch/Questionnaire.pdf.

  11. https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/rerg/flexisketch/GroundTruth.pdf.

  12. This could be changed in future tool versions by using placeholders for the relationship types.

  13. docs.google.com.

  14. https://www.yworks.com/products/yed.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the journal reviewers and André van der Hoek for their very valuable feedback and comments on earlier versions of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Dustin Wüest, Norbert Seyff & Martin Glinz

  2. FHNW, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Windisch, Switzerland

    Dustin Wüest & Norbert Seyff

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  1. Dustin Wüest
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Correspondence to Dustin Wüest.

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Communicated by Mr. Juan de Lara.

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Wüest, D., Seyff, N. & Glinz, M. FlexiSketch: a lightweight sketching and metamodeling approach for end-users. Softw Syst Model 18, 1513–1541 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-017-0623-8

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