On the impact of state-based model-driven development on maintainability: a family of experiments using UniMod

Context: Model-driven approaches are well-known in the academia but one possible showstopper to a wider adoption in the industry is the limited empirical evidence for their claimed advantages and benefits, that could convince the decision makers. Objective: The aim of this work is gauging one of the claimed benefits of model-driven approaches, namely improvement in maintainability, with respect to a code-centric approach. Method: We conducted a family of five experiments involving 100 students that possessed different levels of education (64 Bachelor, 25 Master, and 11 PhD students; in groups sized 11 to 26 per individual experiment). In these experiments, UniMod – a State-based tool for Model-Driven Development using the Unified Modeling Language – is compared with Java-based code-centric programming, in a software maintenance scenario, with the goal of analyzing the effect on the time to perform the maintenance tasks, the correctness of the modified artifacts, and the efficiency. Results: The results show a reduction in time to accomplish the tasks and no impact on correctness. The adoption of the UniMod-MDD approach almost doubles the developers’efficiency, and in presence of a higher software engineering experience the efficiency is even three times higher. Conclusions: We found that the usage of the UniMod-MDD approach in a software maintenance scenario provides benefits over a pure code-centric approach. The benefits deriving from the UniMod-MDD approach are appreciable for all the categories of students, although with differences.