The Influence of the Level of Abstraction on the Evolvability of
Conceptual Models of Information Systems
Empirical Software Engineering, 10 (4):
467--494 (Oktober 2005)DOI: 10.1007/s10664-005-3863-0
Zusammenfassung
In today's dynamic environments, evolvability of information systems
is an increasingly important characteristic. We investigate evolvability
at the analysis level, i.e. at the level of the conceptual models
that are built of information systems (e.g. UML models). More specifically,
we focus on the influence of the level of abstraction of the conceptual
model on the evolvability of the model. Abstraction or genericity
is a fundamental principle in several research areas such as reuse,
patterns, software architectures and application frameworks. The
literature contains numerous but vague claims that software based
on abstract conceptual models has evolvability advantages. Hypotheses
were tested with regard to whether the level of abstraction influences
the time needed to apply a change, the correctness of the change
and the structure degradation incurred. Two controlled experiments
were conducted with 136 subjects. Correctness and structure degradation
were rated by human experts. Results indicate that, for some types
of change, abstract models are better evolvable than concrete ones.
Our results provide insight into how the rather vague claims in
literature should be interpreted.
Beschreibung
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