The Role of Semiotic Engineering in Software Engineering

Semiotic engineering is based upon the semiotic theory of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), which focuses on communication between designers and users. Semiotic engineering tries to improve users' interpretation through meta-communication and emphasizes that designers should play the role of legitimate interlocutors in interactive systems. On the other hand, there is a gap in software engineering on how to obtain systems specifications efficiently, how to create easy-to-understand and communicative models, and how to produce comprehensive modeling languages and development processes. In this paper, we explore several contributions of semiotic engineering to software engineering and discuss how the theory can facilitate the creation of comprehensive artifacts. We also discuss semiotic engineering for assessing and improving software modeling languages, in our case UML. We anticipate that our work would lead to the semiotic theory becoming recognized as a central theory driving software engineering research and practice