IMPROVING CONCEPTUAL DATABASE DESIGN THROUGH FEEDBACK

Design aids can improve the quality of systems developed by end-users and non-expert designers. This paper reports a study undertaken to establish the concept validation of a design aid that is based on feedback to improve the quality of conceptual and logical relational databases. We describe the design of SERFER (Simulated ER based FEedback system for R elational databases) and test its effectiveness in a laboratory experiment using the “hidden operator” method. The results show that feedback can help users detect and correct certain types of database design errors in modeling ternary relationships. However, no improvement seems possible in the case of unary relationships. The experiment could not determine whether errors can be corrected in modeling binary relationships, since the subjects were reasonably adept and rarely committed serious errors in this case. © 1994 Academic Press, Inc.