UML Class Diagram Simplification - A Survey for Improving Reverse Engineered Class Diagram Comprehension

Class diagrams may include an overwhelming amount of information. For a large and complex class diagrams there is a possibility that not all information in the class diagram is important for understanding the system. In this paper, we study how to identify essential and secondary information in class diagrams. To this end, we performed a survey with professionals, academics and students to enquire information in class diagrams that is considered important. In total, 25 complete responses were received with 76% of the respondents having average or above skills with class diagrams. As the results, we discovered that the metric that counts the number of public operations is the most important metric for indicating importance of a class in a diagram. Also, we discovered that class names and coupling were influencing factors when it comes to excluding classes from a class diagram.