A replicated experiment with undergraduate students to evaluate the applicability of a use case precedence diagram based approach in software projects

Abstract

The Use Case Precedence Diagram (UCPD) is a technique that addresses the problem of determining the construction sequence or prioritization of a software product from the developer's perspective. This paper presents a replicated controlled experiment with undergraduate students. The results obtained from this experiment confirm the results obtained in previous studies with practitioners in which the proposed approach enables developers to define construction sequences more precisely than with other ad-hoc techniques. However, unlike previous studies with practitioners, qualitative evaluation of the UCPD based on the Method Adoption Model (MAM), where the intention to use a method is determined by the users' perceptions, shows that the relationships defined by the MAM are not confirmed with the results obtained with undergraduate students. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.