:) UML Jokes Contest Background

The INTSPEI' "UML Jokes" project is designed to research semantic capabilities of the Unified Modeling Language and attract the attention of the software community to it. Humor is a very unique human ability. Just how powerful is the "human-computer" language UML to express humor? How creative can people be using it? Where is the true border between "human" and "computer" languages?

The project continues a sequence of experiments conducted by INTSPEI founder, Vladimir L Pavlov, since 2001.

The first experiment was called "The Babel Experiment" and was done in the following manner:

A team of students was assigned the task of designing a software system with one very challenging restriction: UML was the only language allowed for communication while working on the project. Any verbal or written communication involving natural languages was forbidden. The premise was intended to make students go through a "condensed" version of communication problems typical for software development and gain the experience of applying UML to successfully overcome these problems. For students, the event was presented as an experiment, designed to determine whether UML is a "real" language and therefore sufficient for a full range of communications.

The experiment was an astounding success. As an experiment it demonstrated that students always developed clear and concise, high quality models - without any usage of "regular" language, using only UML for communication. As a training, it helped students recognize the real value of UML and gain advanced experience in modeling. It was repeated dozens of times in both academic and industrial environments and always generated fantastic feedback.

Once during a design session two independent teams were accidentally working on the same task. The communication means of the first team was restricted to UML as described above, while the other team was allowed to communicate verbally using a natural language. It turned out that the first, more restricted team, succeeded in performing the task with a greater efficiency than the other team. The UML diagrams created by the first team were more sound, detailed, readable, elaborated, and elegant. It strongly suggested there was a lot more "uncharted territory" in applications for UML than it was previously assumed.

Subsequently, Vladimir L. Pavlov conducted a number of additional experiments intended to reveal whether the "silent" modeling sessions are more productive than the traditional ones. In all these experiments the silent teams were at least as efficient as the others. However, in most cases the silent teams clearly outperformed the traditional ones. Our interpretation is the crucial reasons for such an increase in performance lie in the following:

The impressive successes of these experiments motivated some of the participants to return to their companies and begin implementation of Speechless Modeling into their engineering processes.

Afterward, ideas were constructed for conducting additional new experiments with the specific intention of finding a method to compare UML to natural languages. The premise in these experiments was to set up forward (from a natural language to UML) and backward (from UML to the natural language) "translation" tasks for two teams of professional software designers. This would be done with one team performing the forward translation and the other one performing the backward translation. The intention was to observe how closely the outcome of the backward translation resembled the original text, thus providing verification of correctness of UML model.

The experiments confirmed again that, for information describing software systems, UML has more than sufficient power of expression required to maintain the model's content. Texts obtained after the backward translation from UML were semantically equivalent to the original.

The most important conclusion of these experiments went far beyond the ideas of variables of linguistic applications. The experiments suggested the model of the entire software development cycle existed as a series of translations. Why not then extend the backward testing to the other translations created throughout the development cycle? In subsequent experiments this backward translation verification has been unquestionably demonstrated as a reliable method to help guarantee deliverables of each development step do not lose, or have misinterpreted, anything that was produced at the previous step. Architects and software developers who have participated in Vladimir's experiments started to practice the backward translation verification method in their companies providing fantastic feedback.

The above described experiments led their author to the creation of the new software development methodology, called "P-Modeling Framework". It extends existing development lifecycles (such as RUP and MSF) and allows prevent expensive analysis and design rework. Click here to learn more about INTSPEI P-Modeling Framework.