Directives of Communicability: Towards Better Communication through Software Models

In the development process, software models are commonly used to support communication among members of the development team. The risks of miscommunication through software models relate to the model content and to how content is expressed by the modeler. Communication failures mediated by software models may generate inconsistencies in software behavior, generating rework to correct them later. Aiming to improve model communication quality between their producers and consumers, we developed the Directives of Communicability (DCs). The aim of this paper is to present the DCs and an empirical study. The empirical study indicated that the directives had the intended potential to reduce miscommunication of what software models meant to those who produced them. From the results of this study, we notice that DCs can improve communication quality between model producers and consumers. Our results also show that DCs helped the producers' reflections on their models' content.