skip to main content
10.1145/2424563.2424570acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesmodelsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

UML class diagram simplification: what is in the developer's mind?

Published: 01 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Class diagrams play an important role in software development. However, in some cases, these diagrams contain a lot of information. This makes it hard for software maintainers to use them to understand a system. In this paper, we aim to discover how to simplify class diagrams in a such way that they make systems easier to understand. To this end, we performed a survey to analyze what type of information software developers find important to include or exclude in order to simplify a class diagram. This survey involved 32 software developers with 75% of the participants having more than 5 years of experience with class diagrams. As the result, we found that the important elements in a class diagram are class relationship, meaningful class names and class properties. We also found that information that should be excluded in a simplified class diagram is GUI related information, private and protected operations, helper classes and library classes. In this survey we also tried to discover what types of features are needed for class diagram simplification tools.

References

[1]
S. Bassil and R. K. Keller. Software visualization tools: Survey and analysis, volume 67, pages 7--17. IEEE, 2001.
[2]
B. Bellay and H. Gall. A Comparison of Four Reverse Engineering Tools, pages 2--11. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997.
[3]
R. C. Bjork. Atm system. http://www.math-cs.gordon.edu/courses/cs211/ATMExample/.
[4]
E. J. Chikofsky and J. H. Cross. Reverse Engineering and Design Recovery: A Taxonomy, volume 7, pages 13--17. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1990.
[5]
A. Craig, A. Dinardo, and R. Gillespie. Pacman game. http://code.google.com/p/tb-pacman/.
[6]
A. Egyed. Automated abstraction of class diagrams, volume 11, pages 449--491. ACM Transaction Software Engineering Methodology, 2002.
[7]
H. Eriksson, M. Penker, B. Lyons, and D. Fado. UML 2 Toolkit. Wiley Publishing Inc., 2004.
[8]
A. M. Fernández-Sáez, M. Genero, M. R. V. Chaudron, and I. Ramos. A Controlled Experiment on the Impact of UML Diagram Origin on Maintenance Performance. Unpublished.
[9]
Y.-G. Guéhéneuc. A Systematic Study of UML Class Diagram Constituents for their Abstract and Precise Recovery, pages 265--274. IEEE, 2004.
[10]
A. Nugroho and M. R. V. Chaudron. A Survey of the Practice of Design - Code Correspondence amongst Professional Software Engineers, pages 467--469. Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, September 20--21, 2007.
[11]
H. Osman and M. R. V. Chaudron. An Assessment of Reverse Engineering Capabilities of UML CASE Tools, pages 7--12. 2nd Annual International Conference Proceedings on Software Engineering Application, September 12--13, 2011.
[12]
H. Osman and A. van Zadelhoff. Original questionnaire. http://www.liacs.nl/~hosman/Questionnaire.rar.
[13]
H. Osman and A. van Zadelhoff. Survey data. http://www.liacs.nl/~hosman/SurveyData.rar.
[14]
H. Osman, A. van Zadelhoff, D. Stikkolorum, and M. Chaudron. Technical report. http://www.liacs.nl/~hosman/Technical_Report_2012.pdf.
[15]
S. Yusuf, H. Kagdi, and J. I. Maletic. Assessing the Comprehension of UML Class Diagrams via Eye Tracking, pages 113--122. IEEE, 2007.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Manual Abstraction in the Wild: A Multiple-Case Study on OSS Systems’ Class Diagrams and Implementations2023 ACM/IEEE 26th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS)10.1109/MODELS58315.2023.00017(36-46)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2023
  • (2022)How Developers Choose NamesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2020.297692048:1(37-52)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
  • (2022)Accurate module name prediction using similarity based and sequence generation modelsJournal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing10.1007/s12652-022-03722-214:9(11531-11543)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2022
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
EESSMod '12: Proceedings of the Second Edition of the International Workshop on Experiences and Empirical Studies in Software Modelling
October 2012
57 pages
ISBN:9781450318112
DOI:10.1145/2424563
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 October 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. UML
  2. class diagram
  3. reverse engineering
  4. simplification

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

MODELS '12
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

EESSMod '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 9 of 18 submissions, 50%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 9 of 18 submissions, 50%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)36
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Manual Abstraction in the Wild: A Multiple-Case Study on OSS Systems’ Class Diagrams and Implementations2023 ACM/IEEE 26th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS)10.1109/MODELS58315.2023.00017(36-46)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2023
  • (2022)How Developers Choose NamesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2020.297692048:1(37-52)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
  • (2022)Accurate module name prediction using similarity based and sequence generation modelsJournal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing10.1007/s12652-022-03722-214:9(11531-11543)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2022
  • (2020)A survey on the practical use of UML for different software architecture viewpointsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2020.106275121:COnline publication date: 1-May-2020
  • (2017)Effects of variable names on comprehension an empirical studyProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2017.27(55-65)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
  • (2017)What is the Further Evidence about UML? - A Systematic Literature Review2017 24th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference Workshops (APSECW)10.1109/APSECW.2017.28(106-113)Online publication date: Dec-2017
  • (2015)Are Forward Designed or Reverse-Engineered UML diagrams more helpful for code maintenance?: A family of experimentsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2014.05.01457(644-663)Online publication date: Jan-2015
  • (2014)Condensing reverse engineered class diagrams through class name based abstraction2014 4th World Congress on Information and Communication Technologies (WICT 2014)10.1109/WICT.2014.7077321(158-163)Online publication date: Dec-2014
  • (2014)Interactive Scalable Abstraction of Reverse Engineered UML Class DiagramsProceedings of the 2014 21st Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference - Volume 0110.1109/APSEC.2014.34(159-166)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2014
  • (2013)An Analysis of Machine Learning Algorithms for Condensing Reverse Engineered Class DiagramsProceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance10.1109/ICSM.2013.25(140-149)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2013

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media