Evaluating Visual Realism in Drawing Areas of Interest on UML Diagrams

Areas of interest (AOIs) are defined as an addition to UML diagrams: groups of elements of system architecture diagrams that share some common property. Some methods have been proposed to automatically draw AOIs on UML diagrams. However, it is not clear how users perceive the results of such methods as compared to human-drawn areas of interest. We present here a process of studying and improving the perceived quality of computer-drawn AOIs. We qualitatively evaluated how users perceive the quality of computer- and human-drawn AOIs, and used these results to improve an existing algorithm for drawing AOIs. Finally, we designed a quantitative comparison for AOI drawings and used it to show that our improved renderings are closer to human drawings than the original rendering algorithm results. The combined user evaluation, algorithmic improvements, and quantitative comparison support our claim of improving the perceived quality of AOIs rendered on UML diagrams.

[1]  Emden R. Gansner,et al.  An open graph visualization system and its applications to software engineering , 2000, Softw. Pract. Exp..

[2]  James E. Rumbaugh,et al.  Notation Notes: Principles for Choosing Notation , 1996, J. Object Oriented Program..

[3]  R. Likert.  “Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes, A” , 2022, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[4]  Markus Gross,et al.  H-BLOB: a hierarchical visual clustering method using implicit surfaces , 2000 .

[5]  Michael Balzer,et al.  Exploring Relations within Software Systems Using Treemap Enhanced Hierarchical Graphs , 2005, 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis.

[6]  Nasib S. Gill,et al.  Component-based measurement: few useful guidelines , 2003, SOEN.

[7]  Ray Welland,et al.  Comprehension of diagram syntax: an empirical study of entity relationship notations , 2004, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[8]  Trevor Darrell,et al.  Fast contour matching using approximate earth mover's distance , 2004, CVPR 2004.

[9]  Neil A. Ernst,et al.  A Framework for Empirical Evaluation of Model Comprehensibility , 2007, International Workshop on Modeling in Software Engineering (MISE'07: ICSE Workshop 2007).

[10]  James A. Sethian,et al.  Level Set Methods and Fast Marching Methods , 1999 .

[11]  Alexandru Telea,et al.  Visual Exploration of Combined Architectural and Metric Information , 2005, 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis.

[12]  Sudhir P. Mudur,et al.  On the use of metaballs to visually map source code structures and analysis results onto 3D space , 2002, Ninth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, 2002. Proceedings..

[13]  Andrian Marcus,et al.  3D representations for software visualization , 2003, SoftVis '03.

[14]  David A. Carrington,et al.  Graph Layout Aesthetics in UML Diagrams: User Preferences , 2002, J. Graph Algorithms Appl..

[15]  Alexandru Telea,et al.  Visualization of areas of interest in software architecture diagrams , 2006, SoftVis '06.

[16]  Trevor Darrell,et al.  Fast contour matching using approximate earth mover's distance , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2004. CVPR 2004..

[17]  Dariu Gavrila,et al.  Multi-feature hierarchical template matching using distance transforms , 1998, Proceedings. Fourteenth International Conference on Pattern Recognition (Cat. No.98EX170).

[18]  David A. Carrington,et al.  Empirical Evaluation of Aesthetics-based Graph Layout , 2002, Empirical Software Engineering.

[19]  David A. Carrington,et al.  UML collaboration diagram syntax: an empirical study of comprehension , 2002, Proceedings First International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis.

[20]  Luciano da Fontoura Costa,et al.  Shape Analysis and Classification: Theory and Practice , 2000 .

[21]  James E. Rumbaugh,et al.  Packaging a System: Showing Architectural Dependencies , 1996, J. Object Oriented Program..

[22]  Hausi A. Müller,et al.  Programmable Reverse Engineering , 1994, Int. J. Softw. Eng. Knowl. Eng..

[23]  John Krogstie,et al.  Evaluating UML using a generic quality framework , 2003 .

[24]  Alberto Del Bimbo,et al.  Retrieval by Shape Similarity with Perceptual Distance and Effective Indexing , 2000, IEEE Trans. Multim..

[25]  Gabriel Taubin,et al.  Geometric Signal Processing on Polygonal Meshes , 2000, Eurographics.

[26]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger,et al.  Software Metrics : A Rigorous and Practical Approach , 1998 .