Experimental comparison of coarse-grained concepts in UML, OML, and TOS
Abstract Object-oriented approaches offer coarse-grained modeling concepts to structure complex application systems consisting of hundreds or even thousands of classes. This paper analyses such concepts by using a software engineering experiment. Two factors are controlled: Factor A consists of three object-oriented approaches (unified modeling language (UML), OPEN modeling language (OML), and taxonomic objectsystem (TOS)), and factor B consists of two application systems (a database-oriented application and a process-oriented application). The results show that the coarse-grained concepts of the object-oriented approaches OML and TOS are superior to those of UML when modeling a database-oriented application. From the results it can be concluded that the coarse-grained concepts of UML should be improved in further releases. The data were analysed by using advanced statistical methods.