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A Controlled Experiment on the Impact of the Object Constraint Language in
UML-based Development: Dr. Lionel Briand
The Object Constraint Language (OCL) was introduced as part of the Unified
Modeling Language (UML). Its main purpose is to make UML models more
precise by providing a constraint language. For example, operation contract
and statechart guard conditions can be precisely defined using the OCL.
There has been an ongoing debate on the usefulness of using OCL in
UML-based development, questioning whether the additional effort and
formality was worth the benefit. This presentation will discuss the design
and results of a controlled experiment that investigates the impact of
using OCL on defect detection and maintainability. Current results show
that, once passed an initial learning curve, significant benefits can be
obtained by using OCL in combination with UML diagrams.
Bio
Lionel C. Briand is with the Department of Systems and Computer
Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, where he founded and leads
the
Software Quality Engineering Laboratory.
He has recently been granted the Canada Research Chair in Software Quality
Engineering.
Before that he was the software quality engineering department head at the
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Germany.
Dr. Lionel also worked as a research scientist for the Software Engineering
Laboratory, a consortium of
the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CSC, and the University of Maryland.
He has been on the program, steering, or organization committees of many
international, IEEE conferences such as ICSE, ICSM, ISSRE, and METRICS.
He is the coeditor-in-chief of Empirical Software Engineering (Kluwer), and
is a member
of the editorial boards of Systems and Software Modeling (Springer) and
IEEE Transactions on
Software Engineering. His research interests include: object-oriented
analysis and design, inspections and testing in the context of
object-oriented development, quality assurance and control, project planning
and risk analysis, and technology evaluation.
Lionel received the BSc and MSc degrees in geophysics and computer
systems engineering from the University of Paris VI, France. He received the
PhD degree in computer science, with high honors, from the University of
Paris XI, France.
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