Investigating Novice Modelers’ Intuitive Consistency Notions for the Case of Compositional Models
The terms consistency'' and its counterpart,inconsistency'', are omnipresent in model-driven software engineering. Particularly during model evolution, consistency assurance is a central concern. Technically, consistency can be defined from various viewpoints. However, it is unclear how these definitions of consistency align with practitioners’ mental models. Understanding how practitioners assess and respond to different kinds of consistency problems in their own minds is required for realizing successful consistency assurance. An important aspect towards this goal is the investigation of whether there is a shared mental model of consistency among an evenly experienced group of practitioners. The current state of the art gives no answer to this. In this work, we present a model dataset of 62 consistency problems based on simple, compositional models. For this dataset, we collected 452 consistency ratings from a student group and one rating per problem from an expert group. The results show that there is no common understanding, i.e., there is no shared mental model of consistency within a group or between groups. Still, common patterns in the ratings are observable, such as a preference for rating consistency on a fine-grained scale rather than as a boolean property, or that syntactic contradictions are much less relevant to ratings than subjective semantic interpretations. All developed tools, models, and collected data are openly available for future research.
Wed 1 JulDisplayed time zone: Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris change
15:40 - 17:10 | Consistency and CompositionECMFA 2026 at Petri Chair(s): Georg Hinkel RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Wiesbaden, Germany | ||
15:40 30mTalk | Capturing and Organizing Reusable Interaction Practices Using Justification and Feature Models ECMFA 2026 Sébastien Mosser McMaster University, Shyam Ravichandran McMaster University, Kalvin Thuan-Phong Khuu McMaster University, McSCert, Brian Detlor McMaster University, Denise Geiskkovitch McMaster University, Anne-Marie Pinna-Déry I3S, P.J. White SETU | ||
16:10 30mTalk | Investigating Novice Modelers’ Intuitive Consistency Notions for the Case of Compositional Models ECMFA 2026 Karl Kegel Technische Universität Dresden, Kevin Feichtinger Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Terru Stübinger Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie, Romain Pascual MICS, CentraleSupélec, Université Paris-Saclay, Bernhard Beckert Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Ralf Reussner KIT, Uwe Aßmann TU Dresden, Germany | ||
16:40 30mTalk | Incremental Task-Driven Composition of Heterogeneous Software Models for Legacy System Maintenance ECMFA 2026 Azam Mahdipour McMaster Centre for Software Certification, Vera Pantelic McMaster Centre for Software Certification, Sébastien Mosser McMaster University | ||