A survey and evaluation of tool features for understanding reverse‐engineered sequence diagrams

Abstract

Sequence diagrams can be valuable aids to software understanding. However, they can be extremely large and hard to understand in spite of using modern tool support. Consequently, providing the right set of tool features is important if the tools are to help rather than hinder the user. This paper surveys research and commercial sequence diagram tools to determine the features they provide to support program understanding. Although there has been significant effort in developing these tools, many of them have not been evaluated using human subjects. To begin to address this gap, a preliminary study was performed with a specially designed sequence diagram tool that implements the features found during the survey. On the basis of an analysis of the study results, we discuss the features that were found to be useful and relate these to the tasks performed. It concludes by proposing how future tools can be improved to better support the exploration of large sequence diagrams. Copyright © 2008 Crown in the right of Canada. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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“…There are many works and tools related to reverseengineered sequence diagrams [5]. As mentioned in Sect.…”

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“…Several studies have been conducted about the contribution of diagramming tools in program comprehension [7,9,13]. Hadar et al [11] conducted a study on developers comprehension of UML diagrams.…”

“…They also found that developers even sort diagrams by the type of information they can get from them such as using sequence diagrams to understand the dynamic behavior and class diagrams to study static relations. These studies focused on UML diagrams, and none of them used the runtime structure by statically analyzing the code to do a code modification task even though previous work [11,7] used partial runtime views such as sequence diagrams.…”