EmpER'21 will be held in conjunction with ER 2021 on Monday, October 18th 2021.

Scope

Conceptual modeling has enjoyed substantial growth over the past decades in diverse fields such as Information Systems Analysis, Software Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, Business Analysis and Business Process Engineering. A plethora of conceptual modeling languages, frameworks and systems have been proposed promising to facilitate activities such as communication, design, documentation or decision-making. Success in designing a conceptual modeling system is, however, predicated on demonstrably attaining such goals through observing their use in practical scenarios. At the same time, the way individuals and groups produce and consume models gives raise to cognitive, behavioral, organizational or other phenomena, whose systematic observation may help us better understand how models are used in practice and how we can make them more effective.

Aim and Topics

We aim at bringing together researchers and practitioners with an interest in the empirical investigation of conceptual modeling systems and practices. The workshop invites both reports on specific finished, on-going, or proposed empirical studies, as well as theoretical, review, and experience papers about empirical research in conceptual modeling. Examples of contributions include but are not limited to:

Paper Types

We solicit three types of papers:

Program (NDT time zone, please check the ER homepage for other time zones)

Keynote

Oscar Pastor Lopez: Why Model-Driven Development is not masively used by developers? An Empirical Perspective

Abstract:

There is a lack of empirical evidence on the differences between model-driven development (MDD), where code is automatically derived from conceptual models, and traditional software development method, where code is manually written. Linking Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) practices and Conceptual Modeling (CM)-based principles can provide an attractive and novel perspective to answer the question of what prevents Model-Driven Development from being much more widely accepted and used as a key software development approach. In this keynote we will report our experimental experience based on the design and execution of a set of experiments where we have compared both methods. Results have shown how quality of the software developed following MDD was significantly better only for more complex problems (with more function points). The different replications of the initial baseline experiment that have been performed to study the impact of problem complexity on software quality in the context of MDD, will be discussed. The main goal will be to show how a sound ESE practice can help to better understand and answer practical research questions in the CM working domain.

Bio:

Full Professor and Director of the Research Center on "Métodos de Producción de Software (PROS)” at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain). He received his Ph.D. in 1992, after being a researcher at HP Labs, Bristol, UK. Supervisor of 32 PhD Thesis and with an h-index of 50 according to Google Scholar, he has published more than five hundred research papers in conference proceedings, journals and books, received numerous research grants from public institutions and private industry, and been keynote speaker at several conferences and workshops. Member of the SC of conferences as ER, CAiSE, ESEM, REFSQ, EICS, ICWE, CIbSE or RCIS, his research activities focus on conceptual modeling, web engineering, requirements engineering, information systems design, and model-based software production. He created the object-oriented, formal specification language OASIS and the corresponding software production method OO-METHOD. He led the research and development underlying CARE Technologies that was formed in 1996. CARE Technologies has created an advanced MDA-based Conceptual Model Compiler called IntegraNova, a tool that produces a final software product starting from a conceptual schema that represents system requirements. Recipient of the Peter Chen Award on Conceptual Modelling in 2016, he is currently leading a multidisciplinary project linking Information Systems and Bioinformatics notions, oriented to designing and implementing tools for Conceptual Modelling-based interpretation of the Human Genome information.

Important Dates

Paper submission: extended until July, 16th 2021

Author notification: August, 9th 2021

Camera-ready Version: August, 20th 2021

Workshop Organizers

Program Committee (tentative)

Previous editions

Previous editions of EmpER have been also co-located with the ER conference. Please consider looking at previous papers to get an idea of the scope of the workshop: