This paper presents the results of a personal opinion survey with 106 experts, conducted with the following objectives: (1) to understand (i) how aware experts are of model consistency issues and (ii) how relevant these issues are to experts, in order to understand model consistency in MDSE/UML contexts, and more importantly, (2) to validate a set of 116 UML consistency rules that was systematically collected from the literature, in order to identify the rules that should always be applied.
The survey results describe an overview of how subject matter experts deal with the issue of MDSE/UML consistency. In addition, this survey identified a set of 52 UML consistency rules that should always be checked in every UML diagram. Most of these 52 rules were understood by the majority of the respondents and are general-purpose rules that are involved in the software development phase of design. This subset of 52 rules could be considered (1) added to the UML standard, (2) used as a reference for researchers studying UML/MDSE, and (3) used as a practical example for teaching.