Modeling is an intrinsically human endeavour. While concerned with foundations and technologies, the model-driven engineering (MDE) community has been somehow neglecting the issue of human factors in modeling. However, there is a growing need from the community concerned with quality factors to understand the best practices and systematic approaches to improve the modeller’s experience and confirm the claims of productivity. A particularity of these aspects is that many related questions can only be answered by empirical studies.
The HuFaMo workshop is aimed at creating a space for discussion being a get-together of researchers and practitioners from different communities including MDE, Usability/UX, Human Computer Interaction and Empirical Software Engineering.
We perceive MODELS to be a high-quality venue that has however not sufficiently reflected on human factors in modeling in the past. This workshop is an attempt to compensate for what we deem is a major aspect of modeling, as other venues (such as ICSE) have already acknowledged.
HuFaMo expressly focuses on human factors, in order to raise the awareness for these topics and the associated research questions and methods in the modeling community, providing an outlet for research of this type, guaranteeing high quality reviews by people that apply these research methods themselves. Along with fully complete empirical evaluations, the workshop organizers explicitly encouraged researchers to discuss study designs before conducting their empirical evaluations. The rationale was to create a constructive environment where the HuFaMo participants could contribute to improving the proposed study designs so that stronger (and more easily replicable) empirical designs and results can be obtained. Ultimately, we aim to congregate a community of researchers and practitioners that promotes (possibly independently replicated) empirical assessments on claims related to human factors in modeling.
MODELS hosted the first two editions of HuFaMo in 2015 and 2016. The number of participants, which were between 20 and 30, indicates a significant interest on this growing community. The third edition will thus continue to consolidate and strengthen it.
The third edition of this workshop series (HuFaMo 2018) took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, in October 15, 2018. HuFaMo 2018 was held in conjunction with the ACM/IEEE 21st International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2018), which is the premier conference on systems and software modeling. In this third edition, HuFaMo attracted a considerable number of participants, including researchers and practitioners. The workshop included the discussion of 6 papers and a working session on the setup of an empirical evaluation and its replication at different places thanks to the HuFaMo community.
The HuFaMo Program Committee selected 6 papers for presentation in the workshop, representing a spectrum of views on human factors in software modeling. Here below we briefly outline some of the main contributions of each of those papers and our reflections on them.
Selviandro et al. presented a systematic method to define the
concrete syntax of modeling concepts based on the inheritance
structure of their meta-model. The underlying principle is
named Visual Inheritance. It consists in keeping the visual
representation of a property - the exact representation or its
design principle - for each subclass (if any) of the class where
the property is defined. This approach provides a valuable
support for creating notations to existing metamodels since
it could help the user of the notation inferring the semantic
meaning of the classes and reduce the cognitive overload in
memorising the number of the notations” [
Silva et al. [
Klu¨ nder et al. [
Liaskos and Tambosi [
Renaux et al. presented a software prototype for
automatically capturing UML diagrams from hand-made sketches. A
lot of knowledge is stored in such sketches because they are
produced in the middle of a brainstorming session, or while
explaining parts of the system to some other stakeholder.
Rather than wasting it (generally lost, or thrown away), the
goal of this work is to benefit from it. Ultimately, the goal is
to “capture efficiently the mental model of the author without
asking her/him to transcribe her/his sketch”. [
Finally, Lopes et al. [
Jean-Claude Tarby, CRIStAL - Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique de Lille, France Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, MetaCase Jean Vanderdonckt, Universite´ catholique de Louvain, Belgium
The organizers would like to thank the authors who submitted their works to this third edition of the HuFaMo workshop, all the attendees of the workshop sessions, the PC members who reviewed the submissions, and the remaining organization members.