UML is Back. Or is it? Investigating the Past, Present, and Future of UML in Open Source Software
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Since its inception, UML, the Unified Modeling Language, has been touted as the way to go when it comes to designing and documenting software systems. While being an integral part of many university software engineering programs, UML has found little consideration among developers, especially in open source software. Reasons for this include that UML shares some shortcomings with other forms of documentation (e.g., limited availability, outdatedness, inadequate level of detail). We present a study to investigate the evolution and the current situation regarding the use of UML in open source projects. We mined and analyzed ~13k GitHub projects, developing strategies and heuristics to identify UML files through their extensions and contents, for a quantitative analysis of two decades of evolution of the usage of UML. We explored the popularity of UML, derived characteristics of projects leveraging UML, and analyzed the authors, creators and maintainers, of UML artifacts. Our study confirms that UML is indeed still under-utilized. At the same time we found evidence of a resurgence coinciding with the popularity of human-readable text-based formats, defined and used by tools like PlantUML and Mermaid. We discuss how identifying and addressing the new challenges implied by this resurgence could impact the future of UML.
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Fri 2 MayDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
14:00 - 15:30 | |||
14:00 15mTalk | Decoding the Issue Resolution Process In Practice via Issue Report Analysis: A Case Study of Firefox Research Track Pre-print | ||
14:15 15mTalk | Preserving Privacy in Software Composition Analysis: A Study of Technical Solutions and Enhancements Research Track Huaijin Wang Ohio State University, Zhibo Liu The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Yanbo Dai The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Shuai Wang Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Qiyi Tang Tencent Security Keen Lab, Sen Nie Tencent Security Keen Lab, Shi Wu Tencent Security Keen Lab | ||
14:30 15mTalk | UML is Back. Or is it? Investigating the Past, Present, and Future of UML in Open Source Software Research Track Joseph Romeo Software Institute - USI, Lugano, Switzerland, Marco Raglianti Software Institute - USI, Lugano, Csaba Nagy , Michele Lanza Software Institute - USI, Lugano | ||
14:45 15mTalk | Understanding the Response to Open-Source Dependency Abandonment in the npm EcosystemAward Winner Research Track Courtney Miller Carnegie Mellon University, Mahmoud Jahanshahi Research Assistant, University of Tennessee Knoxville, Audris Mockus The University of Tennessee, Bogdan Vasilescu Raj Reddy Associate Professor of Software and Societal Systems, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, Christian Kästner Carnegie Mellon University | ||
15:00 15mTalk | Understanding Compiler Bugs in Real Development Research Track Hao Zhong Shanghai Jiao Tong University | ||
15:15 15mTalk | Studying Programmers Without Programming: Investigating Expertise Using Resting State fMRI Research Track Zachary Karas Vanderbilt University, Benjamin Gold Vanderbilt University, Violet Zhou University of Michigan, Noah Reardon University of Michigan, Thad Polk University of Michigan, Catie Chang Vanderbilt University, Yu Huang Vanderbilt University | ||