Evaluación empírica y comparativa de herramientas usadas para la validación de requisitos funcionales a nivel de modelos conceptuales basados en UML

Abstract

Conceptual model validation is a key activity to ensure software quality and save costs, especially when adopting any type of Model Driven Software Engineering methodology. In this context, standard modeling languages, such as the Unified Modeling Language -UML, and tools to support validation activities become essential. The objective of this study is to analyze how good the modeling tools are to support the evidence-based validation task. Our objective is to extract the main characteristics of the tools that support this type of validation, so that this study compares tools that help improve the process of early detection of defects in conceptual modeling. Our study uses two research approaches: (1) the main one is an empirical evaluation that analyzes effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction of two selected tools that allow validating requirements in UML conceptual models and (2) a theoretical analysis that complements the previous experiment. The study focuses on the most common type of UML diagram, the class diagram, and two tools widely used by the modeling community to perform evidence-based validation: USE and OCLE