Empirical Study of Software Developers ’ Experiences

There is evidence that CASE tools do not completely meet the goal of their diverse users. Part of the problem seems to be a gap between how programs are represented and manip ulated in the user interfaces of CASE tools and the experiences of software developers, includin g maintainers, testers and programmers. The empirical study presented in this paper uses two different methods to measure the experiences of skilled and novice developers with the same CASE tool for C++. The methods include h euristic evaluation conducted with the experienced developers and psychometric evaluation conducted with both groups. The results indicate that experienced and inexperienced developers reported similar kinds of problems, including poor program learnability, difficulties with the visibility and usefulness of progra m functio nalities, and ambig uous erro r and he lp messages. These findings a re discussed in relation to other empirical results about developers' experiences with CA SE tools.