TAUPE: towards understanding program comprehension
CASCON '06 Proceedings of the 2006 conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
SIGDOC '07 Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Automatic layout of UML use case diagrams
Proceedings of the 4th ACM symposium on Software visualization
Level of detail in UML models and its impact on model comprehension: A controlled experiment
Information and Software Technology
Guidelines on the aesthetic quality of UML class diagrams
Information and Software Technology
Empirical Software Engineering
Taupe: Visualizing and analyzing eye-tracking data
Science of Computer Programming
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UML class diagrams are helpful for understanding the structure of a software system. Algorithms and tools have been developed to generate UML class diagrams automatically for program understanding purposes. However, many tools often ignore perceptual factors in the layout of these diagrams. Therefore, users still have to spend much time and effort rearranging boxes and lines to make the diagram understandable. This paper presents key criteria and guidelines for the effective layout of UML class diagrams from the perspective of perceptual theories. Two UML tools have been analyzed and evaluated to illustrate how the criteria can be applied to improve the readability of class diagrams.