Experimental comparison of sequence and collaboration diagrams in different application domains

This article reports the findings from a controlled experiment where both the comprehensibility and the quality of UML interaction diagrams were investigated in two application domains: management information system (MIS) and real-time (RT) system. The results indicate that collaboration diagrams are easier to comprehend than sequence diagrams in RT systems, while there is no difference in their comprehension in MIS. With respect to quality of diagrams constructed by analysts, in MIS collaboration diagrams are of better quality than sequence diagrams, while in RT there is no significant difference in their quality.