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Abstract : |
This paper describes experimentation aimed at making the comparison of software design methodologies (SDM's) more of an exact science. Our aim is to lay the foundations for this more exact science by establishing fixed methods and conceptual frameworks that are able to assure that comparison efforts will yield predictable, reproducible results. Earlier papers have proposed the use of a systematic process to compare SDM's. This process assumes that the comparison will be done relative to a fixed standard SDM feature classification schema, and with the use of a fixed formalism for modeling the SDM's. Early experiments with this approach have yielded interesting SDM comparisons, but have raised questions about how sensitive these results might be to the choice of modeling formalism. In this paper we study this sensitivity by varying the choice of modeling formalism. We describe an experiment in which we fix a pair of SDM's and then use two different formalisms to obtain two different comparisons of that pair of SDM's. We then compare the comparisons. Our results suggest that comparison results may be relatively insensitive to differences in modeling formalisms. This paper also suggests an approach to further experimentation., |
