First International Workshop on Human Factors in Modeling (HuFaMo 2015):Preface

Abstract

Modeling is a human-intensive enterprise. As such, many research questions related to modeling can only be answered by empirical studies employing human factors. The International Workshop Series on Human Factors in Modeling (HuFaMo) is dedicated to the discussion of empirical research involving human factors in modeling. Our goal is to improve the state of the science and professionalism in empirical research in the Model Based Engineering community. Typical examples of research questions might consider the usability of a certain approach, such as a method or language, or the emotional states or personal judgements of modelers. While concerned with foundations and framework support for modeling, the community has been somehow neglecting the issue of human factors in this context. There is a growing need from the community concerned with quality factors to understand the best practices and systematic approaches to assert usability in modeling and confirm the claims of productivity. This workshop creates a space for discussion being a get together of both MDE, Usability, Human Interfaces and the Experimental Software engineering community. HuFaMo expressly focuses on human factors, in order to raise the awareness for these topics and the associated research methods and questions in the modeling community, providing an outlet for research of this type, guaranteeing high quality reviews by people that apply these research methods themselves. Along with fully complete empirical evaluations, the workshop organizers explicitly encouraged researchers new to empirical methods to discuss study designs before conducting their empirical evaluations. The rationale was to create a constructive environment where the HuFaMo participants could contribute to improving the proposed study designs so that stronger (and more easily replicable) empirical designs and results can be obtained. Ultimately, we aim to congregate a community of researchers and practitioners that promotes (possibly independently replicated) empirical assessments on claims related to human factors in modeling