An empirical study on using stereotypes to improve understanding of UML models

Abstract

Stereotypes were introduced into the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to provide means of customizing this visual, general purpose, object-oriented modeling language, for its usage in specific application domains. The primary purpose of stereotypes is to brand an existing model element with a specific semantics. In addition, stereotypes can also be used as notational shorthand. The paper elaborates on this role of stereotypes from the perspective of UML, clarifies the role and describes a controlled experiment aimed at evaluation of the role - in the context of model understanding. The results of the experiment support the claim that stereotypes with graphical icons for their representation play a significant role in comprehension of models and show the size of the improvement.