Modern software systems' size and complexity are increasing. As a result, more effort is spent for developing and maintaining such systems, and more errors are made during the development and maintenance. To reduce the amount of effort and the number of errors, we propose a solution that is composed of (a) a visual, intuitive, and formal language for documenting software design, (b) an easy-to-use tool that can check whether the design and the implementation are consistent, and (c) an efficient and effective way of working to use the language and the tool. The proposed solution was applied in the context of a large-scale embedded system, and a controlled experiment was conducted with 23 professional developers and 21 M.Sc. students. Benefits are measured in terms of effort reduction (76%) and error prevention (one error per 140 lines of source code).

DATE: January 4, 2007, Thursday@ 13:30
PLACE: EA 409