Implications of Self-Reported Attitudes Towards UML in Bachelor and Master Software Engineering Courses

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is widely adopted as the de facto standard of graphical representations in professional software development. Its complexity, effectiveness, and recently attitudes towards usage have also been explored and documented. This paper looks into the perception of UML usage in bachelor’s software engineering (SE) and master’s global software engineering courses and addresses implications of how these attitudes change from before to after taking a course and how they change from bachelor’s to master’s SE courses. The findings are collected from an undergraduate SE course in Germany and a global software engineering course taught at three universities in Japan, Germany, and Indonesia. Questionnaire and interview data are designed to be comparable and each gathered ex-ante (before) and ex-post (after) the semester. The data includes demographic information, cultural dimensions, and UML usage based on the Technology Acceptance Model. The findings are analyzed in a mixed method approach. An experience report is described for each course from each instructor’s side. The self-reported attitudes towards UML show a boost in confidence after completing a semester, independent of course level and prior experience. The confidence distribution is reset for master’s level students before starting a project. The intent to use for collaborative SE projects is generally strongly present, with a split for master’s students without prior UML experience. While improvements could also be observed in the value of UML to communicate between students/teams and professors/instructors, this was less pronounced for master’s students without prior experience. These findings together are presented as best practices and lessons learned.