How do Graduating Students Evaluate Software Design Diagrams?

An important skill graduating computing students require is to evaluate a given software design and ensure that it satisfies the intended requirements. Prior work has shown that while working with software designs, experts think deeply about the design and simulate scenarios where the design does not satisfy the requirements. In this paper, we examine how students evaluate a given set of software design diagrams (UML class and sequence diagrams) against the given requirements.

We conducted a study with 100 final year computing undergraduate students. Each student was given a sheet which contained the requirements and the design diagrams for a problem. They were asked to identify defects based on the requirements. We used an interpretative content analysis method to come up with categories of student written responses. Our findings show that some students were able to identify scenarios which do not satisfy the requirements (24%) and identify necessary functions which were missing in the design (14%). However, we also found that certain students included new functionalities in the design (10%) and modified existing functionalities (22%) which were unrelated to the given requirements. These findings give insights to what students focus on and the mental models they create while evaluating software design diagrams.