A revision tool for teaching and learning sequence diagrams
Peter Thomas, Kevin Waugh, Neil Smith · 2008
Abstract: This paper describes a software tool that has been developed to help students learn to produce UML sequence diagrams (SDs) in the context of object modelling. The tool, called the SD-Exerciser, developed from an earlier tool for learning about entity-relationship diagrams, presents a student with a series of questions and invites the student to produce SDs that represent the interactions for the use cases embedded in the questions. The SD-Exerciser marks each attempt at a diagram and provides several feedback perspectives on the student’s answer. A new development is the ability to check a sequence diagram for syntax errors some of which the tool will attempt to repair. The SD-Exerciser incorporates an automatic marking algorithm based on the successful ERD marker and experiments to date show that it continues to be effective in the new situation. A sequence diagram (SD) is a graphical notation used to describe how groups of objects collaborate in some behaviour (Stevens & Pooley, 2000). They are one of two types of interaction diagrams defined in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) (Pilone, 2005). When teaching object-oriented analysis and design, it is quite common to start with class diagrams to show the relationships between objects and then move to sequence diagrams to represent the messages that flow between objects when describing a use case. Our interest in sequence diagrams stems from our work on understanding diagrams [Smith et al. 2004]), in particular