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Record W3122145429 · doi:10.5381/jot.2021.20.2.a1

The Evolution of Software Design Practices Over a Decade: A Long Term Study of Practitioners.

2021· article· en· W3122145429 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Object Technology · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSoftware Engineering Techniques and Practices
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Ottawa
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTerm (time)Software evolutionComputer scienceSoftwareSoftware engineeringSoftware developmentSoftware constructionProgramming languagePhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

We present the results of a survey of 248 software practitioners conducted in three phases ten years apart. The goal of the study is to uncover trends in the practice of software design and the adoption patterns of modeling languages such as UML. The first phase was conducted in April-December 2007 and included 113 responses. The second phase was conducted in March-November 2017 and included 115 responses. The third phase is a post-survey study was conducted in November 2018 and included additional questionnaires with 20 participants. All survey phases were conducted online, employed identical solicitation mechanisms, and included the same set of questions. The survey results are analyzed within each phase and across phases. We present the results and analysis of the data identifying upward and downward trends in design and modeling practices. The results indicate a significant increase in the use of well-defined and formal modeling languages, as well as a marked increase in the adoption of Domain-Specific Languages. This is also reflected in a significant increase in the adoption of forward engineering methodologies. A key motivation for this uptake is a concern that programming languages and platforms may become quickly outdated. Unfortunately, there has been a consistent dissatisfaction with modeling tools features, particularly their ability to support effective communication and collaboration. This is mirrored by increasing dissatisfaction with modeling tools usability and learnability. Future projections of this study suggest that diversity in modeling languages and tools is likely to continue to grow, as well as the increase in reliance on models for automated artifacts generation. As such, model and tool interoperability is likely to become an even greater concern for the years to come. The results of this study can help researchers, practitioners, and educators to focus efforts on issues of relevance and significance to the profession. Specifically, this research will advocate to build better software modeling tools and promote modeling to the educators.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.648
Threshold uncertainty score0.492

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.024
GPT teacher head0.307
Teacher spread0.283 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it