R. Meersman, Z. Tari et al. (Eds.): OTM 2006, LNCS 4275, pp. 625 – 642, 2006. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006 Evaluation of a Conceptual Model-Based Method for Discovery of Dependency Links Darijus Strasunskas and Sari Hakkarainen Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway {dstrasun, sari}@idi.ntnu.no Abstract. In practice dependency management often suffers from labor inten- sity and complexity in creating and maintaining the dependency relations. Our method targets projects, where developers are geographically distributed and a wide range of tools is used. A conceptual domain model is used to inter-relate the development objects and to automate dependency link discovery. The pro- posed method is based on association of development objects with concepts from domain model. These associations are used to compute dependency among development objects, and are stepwise refined to direct dependency links. A preliminary empirical evaluation of the method is conducted. The method is evaluated both on performance and psychological variables. The evaluation has been performed in laboratory settings using two real cases. The results, al- though preliminary, provide positive evidence about the ability of our method to automate discovery of dependency relations, the analysis indicates that the method is perceived to be easy to use and useful by its potential users. Keywords: Conceptual model-centric development, geographically distributed development, cooperative systems development, dependency management. 1 Introduction Traditional systems development has been centered on small projects and co-located teams using a limited toolset. Today, the organisations meet a large number of stake- holders, broad geographical distribution alongside a wide range of tools [24]. The output from a systems development process ranges from requirements specification and architecture to design and code. Typically, all these parts should be integral and related. Thus, the end product of IS development is not a homogeneous specification, but rather a collection of loosely correlated product fragments (e.g., requirements specification, design, code, test scenarios, and documentation). Distributed development projects have special settings and needs. One problem here is the management of product fragments diversity; discovery and maintenance of dependency links among the heterogeneous product fragments. However, dependency management often suffers from an extensive effort and complexity of creating and maintaining the traces [4]. To solve the problem, we have proposed to use conceptual model not only to guide the design of a system, but also to actually access and man- age the information produced during the IS development. We propose to use a