How Understandable Are Pattern-based Behavioral Constraints for Novice Software Designers?

This article reports a controlled experiment with 116 participants on the understandability of representative graphical and textual pattern-based behavioral constraint representations from the viewpoint of novice software designers. Particularly, graphical and textual behavioral constraint patterns present in the declarative business process language Declare and textual behavioral constraints based on Property Specification Patterns are the subjects of this study. In addition to measuring the understandability construct, this study assesses subjective aspects such as perceived difficulties regarding learning and application of the tested approaches. An interesting finding of this study is the overall low achieved correctness in the experimental tasks, which seems to indicate that pattern-based behavioral constraint representations are hard to understand for novice software designers in the absence of additional supportive measures. The results of the descriptive statistics regarding achieved correctness are slightly in favor of the textual representations, but the inference statistics do not indicate any significant differences in terms of understandability between graphical and textual behavioral constraint representations.