Directives of Communicability: Teaching Students How to Improve Communication Through Software Modeling

In the development process, software models are used to support communication among development team members. Failures of communication that is mediated by software models may generate inconsistencies in software behavior, generating rework to correct them. This may occur because producers usually focus only on model content, although they should also reflect on how other members of the development team will interpret their models. We should therefore teach software engineering students how to communicate better through software models. In an attempt to improve communication through software models, we have developed the Directives of Communicability (DCs), based on theories that investigate different kinds of communication. In this poster, we present the highlights of a study to find out whether DCs improve software engineering students' communication through software models. Our results confirm that DCs have improved the students' reflections on how their models' content will be interpreted during the software development process.