A pilot study of comparative customer comprehension between extreme x-machine and uml models

Abstract

Many design notations are used during software development to help the developers better understand the required system. However they are infrequently shown to clients, partly because developers believe that clients don't understand them. In this study we investigate the extent to which clients comprehend three types of diagram. Two popular UML diagrams (activity and use case) and Extreme X-Machines diagrams (a type of state diagram developed to support Extreme Programming) were shown to three clients for whom we had recently delivered the software that was represented. The clients were given some simple guidance on interpreting them and asked to evaluate how well they understood them. This pilot study found that all the diagrams studied seemed to be equally well understood, but further studies are required to evaluate their usefulness.