The results are generalizable to industrial UML users and can be used for improving quality assurance techniques for UML-based development. Additionally we observed effects of using domain knowledge to compensate defects. We present a classification of defect types based on a ranking of detection rate and risk for misinterpretation.

The experiment's results show that defects often remain undetected and cause misinterpretations. We performed two controlled experiments with a large group of students (111) and a group of industrial practitioners (48). This study investigates to what extent implementers detect defects and to what extent defects cause different interpretations by different readers. Previous research has shown that industrial UML models that are used as basis for implementation and maintenance contain large numbers of defects. As a result UML models may contain consistency defects.

UML offers a large number of diagram types that can be used with varying degree of rigour. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the de facto standard for designing and architecting software systems.