Evaluating Using Animation to Improve Understanding of Sequence Diagrams

This paper describes an experiment whereby the benefit of using animation to improve the comprehensibility of UML sequence diagrams is assessed. The paper hypothesizes that through animation the control flow of sequence diagram will become more evident. The development a system that seeks to enable stakeholders to better interpret UML modeling behaviour is described. This system aims to provide dynamic visualization through the use of animation techniques. A study to evaluate the extent to which the animation of a diagram can aid its interpretation is then described. The results of the study show that the animation system did improve the comprehensibility of the sequence diagram control flow thus improving the comprehensibility when compared to the comprehensibility of a traditional static representation. Finally, this paper discusses the reasoning for these results.