dc.description.abstract | Unified Modelling Language (UML) provides the facility for software engineers to
specify, construct, visualize, and document the artifacts of a software system and to
facilitate communication of ideas [1, 2]. It is shown in many studies [9, 14, 16] that
the quality of UML models has an impact on the quality of software systems. It is
not easy, and often a time-consuming task to maintain a good quality of UML models
throughout the development process. For that reason, in many projects, UML
models are left outdated as the projects go on. This will lead to a gap between the
software design (reflected in UML models) and the actual implementation [4]. The
goal of this thesis is to automate the process of assessing the quality of UML models
in open source projects. We chose the design science research methodology to carry
out this thesis to achieve the thesis goal. The result of this thesis is UML-Ninja,
which is a web tool that can automatically assess the quality of UML models in
open source projects based on metrics and rules. The resulted tool (UML-Ninja)
was evaluated based on 15 interviews with researchers, students, and practitioners.
Researchers, students, and practitioners found UML-Ninja and the automated approach
behind it can help them to obtain a better assessment of UML models quality
as well as improving the quality of UML models. | sv |