Impact of Domain Modeling Techniques on the Quality of Domain Model: An Experiment

The unified modeling language (UML) is widely used to analyze and design different software development artifacts in an object oriented development. Domain model is a significant artifact that models the problem domain and visually represents real world objects and relationships among them. It facilitates the comprehension process by identifying the vocabulary and key concepts of the business world. Category list technique identifies concepts and associations with the help of pre defined categories, which are important to business information systems. Whereas noun phrasing technique performs grammatical analysis of use case description to recognize concepts and associations. Both of these techniques are used for the construction of domain model, however, no empirical evidence exists that evaluates the quality of the resultant domain model constructed via these two basic techniques. A controlled experiment was performed to investigate the impact of category list and noun phrasing technique on quality of the domain model. The constructed domain model is evaluated for completeness, correctness and effort required for its design. The obtained results show that category list technique is better than noun phrasing technique for the identification of concepts as it avoids generating unnecessary elements i.e. extra concepts, associations and attributes in the domain model. The noun phrasing technique produces a comprehensive domain model and requires less effort as compared to category list. There is no statistically significant difference between both techniques in case of correctness.

@article{Nisa2016,
  title     = {Impact of Domain Modeling Techniques on the Quality of Domain Model: An Experiment},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {7},
  number    = {10},
  year      = {2016},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Hiqmat Nisa and Salma Imtiaz and Muhammad Uzair Khan and Saima Imtiaz},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2016.071007},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2016.071007}
}