A survey about the intent to use visual defect annotations for software models

Today, many practitioners have consolidated their experience with software models in collections of design flaws, smells, antipatterns, or guidelines that have a negative impact on quality aspects (such as maintainability). Besides these quality defects, many compilability errors or conformance warnings might occur in a software design. Programming IDEs typically present problems regarding compilability in or near the code (e.g., icons at the line or underlining in the code). Modeling IDEs in MDSD follow a visual paradigm and need a similar mechanism for presenting problems in a clear, consistent, and familiar way. In this paper, we present different visualization concepts for visualizing quality defects and other problems in software models. These concepts use different dimensions such as color, size, or icons to present this information to the user. We used a survey to explore the opinions held by practitioners showing that 89.9% want to be informed about potential de fects and prefer icon-, view- and underscore-based concepts to other types of concepts.