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To UML or not to UML?: Empirical Study on the Approachability of Software Architecture Diagrams

Authors:

Veli-Pekka Eloranta,

Essi Isohanni,

Samuel Lahtinen,

Outi Sievi-KorteAuthors Info & Claims

ASWEC ' 15 Vol. II: Proceedings of the ASWEC 2015 24th Australasian Software Engineering Conference

Pages 101 - 105

https://doi.org/10.1145/2811681.2811701

Published: 28 September 2015 Publication History

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Abstract

Software architecture design is key to building systems that meet quality demands. Choosing the appropriate way to model the architecture ensures it is rightly understood by everyone involved. UML diagrams are commonly used in software engineering but free-form diagrams are almost as common. In this paper, we study the factors influencing the approachability of diagrams, and particularly whether there is a difference in the approachability between UML and non-UML diagrams and colored and black & white diagrams. Our results show that colors do not necessarily increase the approachability of diagrams and free-form diagrams can suffer from ambiguousness. We conclude that simplicity and correctness are key factors when modeling architectures.

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Yousaf NArif MAwan MButt W(2022)Investigation of Latest CASE Tools for Database Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review2022 International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology (FIT)10.1109/FIT57066.2022.00012(7-12)Online publication date: Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/FIT57066.2022.00012

Index Terms

To UML or not to UML?: Empirical Study on the Approachability of Software Architecture Diagrams
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Software implementation planning
        Software design techniques
    2. Software development process management
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types

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Published In

ASWEC ' 15 Vol. II: Proceedings of the ASWEC 2015 24th Australasian Software Engineering Conference

September 2015

171 pages

ISBN:9781450337960

DOI:10.1145/2811681

Editors:
Fei-Ching (Diana) Kuo
Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
,
Stuart Marshall
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
,
Haifeng Shen
Flinders University, Australia
,
Markus Stumptner
University of South Australia, Australia
,
M. Ali Babar
University of Adelaide, Australia

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 the author(s) 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].

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Australian Comp Soc: Australian Computer Society

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 28 September 2015

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ASWEC ' 15 Vol. II

ASWEC ' 15 Vol. II: ASWEC 2015 24th Australasian Software Engineering Conference

September 28 - October 1, 2015

SA, Adelaide, Australia

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ASWEC ' 15 Vol. II Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 27 submissions, 44%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 12 of 27 submissions, 44%

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Yousaf NArif MAwan MButt W(2022)Investigation of Latest CASE Tools for Database Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review2022 International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology (FIT)10.1109/FIT57066.2022.00012(7-12)Online publication date: Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/FIT57066.2022.00012

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Towards a UML profile for software architecture descriptions

The impact of structural complexity on the understandability of UML statechart diagrams

Formal definition of measures for UML statechart diagrams using OCL

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Towards a UML profile for software architecture descriptions

The impact of structural complexity on the understandability of UML statechart diagrams

Formal definition of measures for UML statechart diagrams using OCL

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