An Early Investigation on the Contribution of Class and Sequence Diagrams in Source Code Comprehension

We report the preliminary results of a controlled experiment conducted to analyze whether the combined use of UML class and sequence diagrams better supports source code comprehension with respect to the use of class and sequence diagrams alone. We also investigated which notation between class and sequence diagrams provides a better support in the execution of comprehension tasks on source code. The results suggest that it is better to use class and sequence diagrams together with respect to using either class or sequence diagrams alone. The difference in the source code comprehension is statistically significant with respect to the use of class diagrams alone, while is not statistically significant with respect to the sequence diagrams alone.