Towards realism in drawing areas of interest on architecture diagrams

Abstract

Areas of interest (AOIs) are defined as groups of elements of system architecture diagrams that share some common property. Visualizing AOIs is a useful addition to plain diagrams, such as UML diagrams. Some methods have been proposed to automatically draw AOIs on UML diagrams. However, it is not clear whether actual users perceive the results of such methods to be better or worse as compared to human-drawn AOI, and what needs to be improved. We present here a process of studying and improving the perceived quality of computer-drawn AOI. For this, we conducted a qualitative evaluation that delivered insight in how users perceive the quality of computer-drawn AOIs as compared to hand-drawn diagrams. Following these results, we derived and implemented several improvements to an existing algorithm for computer-drawn AOIs. Next, we designed a distance metric to quantitatively compare different AOI drawings, and used this metric to show that our improved rendering algorithm creates drawings which are closer to (good) human drawings than the original rendering algorithm. We present here the results of the user evaluation, our improved algorithm for drawing AOIs, and the quantitative analysis performed to compare different drawings. The combined user evaluation, algorithmic improvements, and quantitative comparison method support our claim of having improved the perceived quality and understandability of AOI rendered on architecture diagrams. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.</p