Improving the Developer Experience with a Low-Code ProcessModelling Language: Companion site

This companion site contains additional data to complement the paper:

Henriques, H., Lourenço, H., Amaral, V., and Goulão, M. (2018). Improving the developer experience with a low-code process modelling language. In ACM/IEEE 21st International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2018), Copenhagen, Denmark. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3239372.3239387

Abstract

Context: The OutSystems Platform is a development environment composed of several DSLs, used to specify, quickly build and validate web and mobile applications. The DSLs allow users to model different perspectives such as interfaces and data models, define custom business logic and construct process models.

Problem: TheDSL for process modelling (Business Process Technology (BPT)), has a low adoption rate and is perceived as having usability problems hampering its adoption. This is problematic given the language maintenance costs.

Method: We used a combination of interviews, a critical review of BPT using the “Physics of Notation” and empirical evaluations of BPT using the System Usability Scale (SUS)and the NASA Task Load indeX (TLX), to develop a new version ofBPT, taking these inputs and Outsystems’ engineers culture into account.

Results: Evaluations conducted with 25 professional soft-ware engineers showed an increase of the semantic transparency on the new version, from 31% to 69%, an increase in the correctness of responses, from 51% to 89%, an increase in the SUS score, from 42.25 to 64.78, and a decrease of the TLX score, from 36.50 to 20.78. These differences were statistically significant.

Conclusions: These results suggest the new version of BPT significantly improved the developer experience of the previous version. The end users background with OutSystems had a relevant impact on the final concrete syntax choices and achieved usability indicators.

Contents

This companion site provides a permanent link for additional data to the supported paper.

This repository includes:

• Surveys and Questionnaires used in the evaluation reported in the paper
  • Survey on OutSystems BPT notations (survey.pdf)
  • Prototype Symbol Set Questionnaire (PrototypeSymbolSetQuestionnaire.pdf)
  • Original BPT Evaluation (languages.png)
  • Usability Evaluation (sus.png)
  • Cognitive Effort Evaluation (tlx.png)
  • Testing environment screenshot (Testing Environment Screenshot)
• Statistics
  • SUS and NASA TLX
    • Descriptive statistics (SUSTLXDescriptiveStats.pdf)
    • Normality tests (SUSTLXNormality.pdf)
    • Correlation test (SUSTLXCorrelation.pdf)
    • Scatterplot (SUSTLXScatterplot.pdf)