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Towards the principled design of software engineering diagrams

Published: 01 June 2000 Publication History

Abstract

Diagrammatic specification, modelling and programming languages are increasingly prevalent in software engineering and, it is often claimed, provide natural representations which permit of intuitive reasoning. A desirable goal of software engineering is the rigorous justification of such reasoning, yet many formal accounts of diagrammatic languages confuse or destroy any natural reading of the diagrams. Hence they cannot be said to be intuitive. The answer, we feel, is to examine seriously the meaning and accuracy of the terms “natural” and “intuitive” in this context. This paper highlights, and illustrates by means of examples taken from industrial practice, an ongoing research theme of the authors. We take a deeper and more cognitively informed consideration of diagrams which leads us to a more natural formal underpinning that permits (i) the formal justification of informal intuitive arguments, without placing the onus of formality upon the engineer constructing the argument; and (ii) a principled approach to the identification of intuitive (and counter-intuitive) features of diagrammatic languages.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE '00: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering
June 2000
843 pages
ISBN:1581132069
DOI:10.1145/337180
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 June 2000

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Author Tags

  1. diagrammatic languages
  2. programmable logic controllers
  3. software diagrams

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  • (2017)The Semiotics of Spider DiagramsLogica Universalis10.1007/s11787-017-0167-211:2(177-204)Online publication date: 4-May-2017
  • (2014)Equivalences in Euler-based diagram systems through normal formsLMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics10.1112/S146115701400011417:1(431-484)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2014
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