Why looking isn't always seeing: readership skills and graphical programming
Communications of the ACM
Building Knowledge through Families of Experiments
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Information visualization: perception for design
Information visualization: perception for design
Experimentation in software engineering: an introduction
Experimentation in software engineering: an introduction
Writing Effective Use Cases
UML class diagram syntax: an empirical study of comprehension
APVis '01 Proceedings of the 2001 Asia-Pacific symposium on Information visualisation - Volume 9
Graph drawing aesthetics and the comprehension of UML class diagrams: an empirical study
APVis '01 Proceedings of the 2001 Asia-Pacific symposium on Information visualisation - Volume 9
Practical guidelines for the readability of IT-architecture diagrams
Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Empirical Evaluation of Aesthetics-based Graph Layout
Empirical Software Engineering
Automated abstraction of class diagrams
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Human Perception of Laid-Out Graphs
GD '98 Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Graph Drawing
Nice class diagrams admit good design?
Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Software visualization
Evidence-Based Software Engineering for Practitioners
IEEE Software
The Elements of UML(TM) 2.0 Style
The Elements of UML(TM) 2.0 Style
On Evaluating the Layout of UML Class Diagrams for Program Comprehension
IWPC '05 Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Program Comprehension
Communications of the ACM - Two decades of the language-action perspective
Assessing the Comprehension of UML Class Diagrams via Eye Tracking
ICPC '07 Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension
Evaluating UML Class Diagram Layout based on Architectural Importance
VISSOFT '05 Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis
Automatic layout of UML use case diagrams
Proceedings of the 4th ACM symposium on Software visualization
An experimental investigation of UML modeling conventions
MoDELS'06 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems
A Methodology for Collecting Valid Software Engineering Data
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Off-screen visualization techniques for class diagrams
Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Software visualization
Domain-specific language modelling with UML profiles by decoupling abstract and concrete syntaxes
Journal of Systems and Software
Rank-directed layout of UML class diagrams
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Software Mining
A metric towards evaluating understandability of state machines: An empirical study
Information and Software Technology
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In the past, formatting guidelines have proved to be a successful method to improve the readability of source code. With the increasing success of visual specification languages such as UML for model-driven software engineering visual guidelines are needed to standardize the presentation and the exchange of modeling diagrams with respect to human communication, understandability and readability. In this article, we introduce a new and encompassing taxonomy of visual guidelines capturing the aesthetic quality of UML class diagrams. We propose these guidelines as a framework to improve the aesthetic quality and thus the understandability of UML class diagrams. To validate this claim, we describe in detail a controlled experiment carried out as a pilot study to gather preliminary insights on the effects of some of the guideline rules on the understandability of UML class diagrams.