A Visualization Framework for Task-Oriented Modeling Using UML

The UML is a collection of 13 diagram notations to describe different views of a software system. The existing diagram types display model elements and their relations. Software engineering is becoming more and more model-centric, such that software engineers start using UML models for more tasks than just describing the system. Tasks such as analysis or prediction of system properties require additional information such as metrics of the UML model or from external sources, e.g. a version control system. In this paper we identify tasks of model-centric software engineering and information that is required to fulfil these tasks. We propose views to visualize the information to support fulfilling the tasks. This paper reports on industrial case studies and a light-weight user experiment to validate the usefulness of the proposed views that are implemented in our MetricView evolution tool