A Heuristic for Developing Object Interaction Diagrams (original) (raw)

Quality and comprehension of UML interaction diagrams - an experimental comparison

Information and Software Technology, 2005

UML (Unified Modeling Language) is a collection of somewhat overlapping modeling techniques, thus creating a difficulty in establishing practical guidelines for selecting the most suitable techniques for modeling OO artifacts. This is true mainly with respect to two types of interaction diagrams: Sequence and Cllaboration. Attempts have been made to evaluate the comprehensibility of these diagram types for various types of applications, but they did not address the issue of quality of diagrams created by analysts. This article reports the findings from a controlled experiment where both the comprehensibility and quality of the interaction diagrams were investigated in two application domains: management information systems (MIS) and real-time (RT) systems. Our results indicate that collaboration diagrams are easier to comprehend than sequence diagrams in RT systems, but there is no difference in comprehension of the two diagram types in MIS. Irrespective of the diagram type, it is easier to comprehend interaction diagrams of MIS than of RT systems. With respect to diagram quality, in the case of MIS, analysts create collaboration diagrams of better quality than sequence diagrams, but there is no significant difference in quality of diagrams created in RT systems. Irrespective of the diagram type, more correct diagrams are created in MIS applications than in RT applications.

Challenges in Developing Sequence Diagrams (UML)

Journal of Information Technology and Computer Science (JITeCS), 2020

During the object-oriented software design phase, the designers have to describe the dynamic aspect of the system under development through the most common interaction diagram variant in UML 2.0, i.e. sequence diagrams. Some novice designers, including undergraduate and postgraduate students, suffer from making inappropriate models due to insufficiently detailed guidance required to develop such sequence diagrams. This paper classifies some potential mistakes which are likely performed by such novice designers, and discusses the corresponding corrections. We summarized such mistakes based on our long experiences in teaching software modeling classes as well as software analysis and design classes. There were classified twenty-one potential mistakes with respect to the syntactical and semantical correctness of the developed models. It is concluded that novice designers have to be aware and take into account the identified mistakes in such a way they can produce correct sequence diagrams.

Supporting collaborative modelling in UML class diagrams

Revista Brasileira de Computação Aplicada, 2019

Background. Modeling architectural aspects of the system is an essential activity in software development. Inthis context, developers work in parallel, and collaborate to define application software models, such as classdiagrams. Problem. Although many software modeling tools have been proposed, there is a lack of distributed collaboration features. Solution. This study proposes C-SAMT, a web tool for collaborative modeling of UML class diagrams. Developers can benefit from using C-SAMT when performing modeling tasks, such as creating domain models in parallel, and collaboratively. Evaluation. We recruited 20 industry professionals to perform a qualitative evaluation of the tool through a questionnaire. Results. Majority of Industry professionals (85%, 17/20) reported that totally agree that the communication channel of the tool worked properly, they also (80%, 16/20) totally agreed the models generated collaboratively with C-SAMT had small numbers of conflicts, and they also (90%, ...

Diagramming the Class Diagram: Toward a Unified Modeling Methodology

The object-oriented class is, in general, the most utilized element in programming and modeling. It is employed throughout the software development process, from early domain analysis phases to later maintenance phases. A class diagram typically uses elements of graph theory, e.g., boxes, ovals, lines. Many researchers have examined the class diagram layout from different perspectives, including visibility, juxtaposability, and aesthetics. While software systems can be incredibly complex, class diagrams represent a very broad picture of the system as a whole. The key to understanding of such complexity is use of tools such as diagrams at various levels of representation. This paper develops a more elaborate diagrammatic description of the class diagram that includes flows of attributes, thus providing a basic representation for specifying behavior and control instead of merely listing methods.