UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE

   COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM


		presents

 "UML notation and layout: empirical studies"

		speaker:

          Dr. Helen C. Purchase
       Computer Science Department
          University of Glasgow 


	 22 October 2003 (Wednesday)

	  Lecture Theatre E350 
      Hatfield College Lane Campus
		3:15 - 4:15 pm


 Coffee/tea and biscuits will be available.


      Everyone is Welcome to Attend


Abstract:

There are two complementary threads to this research: graphical
notation and layout. While they deal with different aspects of
graphical presentation, we have investigated both in our empirical
studies of UML comprehension.

Despite UML being considered a software engineering standard, the UML
syntactic notations used in texts, papers, documentation and CASE
tools are often different. The decision as to how to represent UML
diagrams appears to be according to the personal preference of the
author or publisher, rather than according to a defined standard, or
based on any consideration of the ease with which the notation can be
understood by human readers.

Similarly, the algorithms which are used for presenting UML diagrams
in CASE tools vary, and, despite the significant work that has been
done on automatic graph layout algorithms, few of these algorithms
have been empirically tested with respect to human comprehension.

This seminar reports on experiments that take a human comprehension
perspective on UML class and collaboration diagram notational
variants, and on the different graph drawing aesthetics on which their
automatic layout could be based. A similar experimental methodology
was used for all four experiments, requiring subjects to indicate
whether a supplied textual document matched each of a set of
experimental diagrams.

The results reveal that the best performing notation may depend on the
task for which it is used, and that the actual semantics of the
diagram may effect the choice of which is the best layout method to
use.

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Colloquium Schedule & Abstracts:
http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq/