Preface Electronic Communications of the EASST Volume 13 (2008) Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Layout of (Software) Engineering Diagrams (LED 2008) Preface Andrew Fish, Harald Störrle II pages Guest Editors: Andrew Fish, Harald Störrle Managing Editors: Tiziana Margaria, Julia Padberg, Gabriele Taentzer ECEASST Home Page: http://www.easst.org/eceasst/ ISSN 1863-2122 http://www.easst.org/eceasst/ ECEASST Preface This volume contains the proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Layout of (Soft- ware) Engineering Diagrams (LED’08), held in Herrsching am Ammersee, Germany on Septem- ber 15th, 2008, as a satellite event of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Hu- man Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2008). Traditionally, diagrams play an important role in many disciplines from electrical engineer- ing (e.g. Karnaugh diagrams), civil and mechanical engineering (construction plans), geography (maps), and so on. In Software Engineering, diagrammatic languages like IDEF, UML or ARIS are commonplace today. With the rise of model driven development and domain specific lan- guages, such languages will be even more widespread in the future. All in all, diagrams play an important role in the communication among engineers. Given the visual nature of diagrams, it is obvious that the quality of diagram layout greatly contributes to the quality of communication based on these diagrams. However, creating task- adequate layouts is surprisingly hard, and the cognitive factors involved are not very well under- stood. Also, tool support of all kinds is mainly an open problem (e.g. consider the sorry state of automatic layout support in UML tools). Contributions to LED were sought in the following areas: Layout algorithms, guidelines and patterns; Visual language theory; Quality attributes related to layout; Layout styles and model- ing purposes; Surveys of layouts in specific areas; Diagrammatic reasoning; Visualisation con- straints, algorithms, and tools; Cognitive aspects of diagram layout Knowledge representation and diagram layout; Empirical research on layouts. The main idea of this workshop series is to bring together scientists and professionals dealing with the layout of diagrams, leading to an exchange and cross-fertilization between practical software engineering and the academic software engineering community, as well as to involve participants and contributors from a wider audience to start discussions, share knowledge and incite fertilization across disciplinary boundaries. The six papers presented here were each reviewed by three programme committee members, with at least one review being from a software professional, and provide an insight into some of the interesting areas of software engineering diagram layout currently being investigated. Fur- thermore, the programme opened with an invited talk given by Eileen Kraemer about the design of experiments for empirical testing in the area, and concluded with a live experiment by Paul McIntosh and Jens von Pilgrim, the details of which are also reported here. As anyone who has organised such a meeting knows, success depends on many people. We wish to thank the members of the Programme Committee, who, despite being given a very short time to complete their tasks, provided prompt and helpful feedback. Thanks are also due to the VL/HCC 2008 organisers for providing the opportunity to run LED’08. We are grateful to the editors Tiziana Margaria, Julia Padberg, and Gabriele Taentzer of ECEASST for their support and the smooth publication. Finally, we wish to thank the LED’08 presenters, without whom there would be no workshop. Andrew Fish and Harald Störrle September 2008 I / II Volume 13 (2008) Program Chairs Andrew Fish, University of Brighton Harald Störrle, Software and Methodology consultant Programme Committee Phil Cox, Dalhousie University Holger Eichelberger, University of Hildesheim Wolfgang Glock, mgm technology partners GmbH Ulrike Gröttrup, Bayerische Landesbank Corin Gurr, University of Reading Florian Hacklinger, Zühlke Engineering John Hosking, University of Auckland Chris Hundhausen, Washington State University Alexander Knapp, University of Munich Eileen Kraemer, University of Georgia Kim Marriott, Monash University Mark Minas, Universität der Bundeswehr München Nikolaus Müssigmann, FH des Saarlandes Barbara Paech, University of Heidelberg Helen Purchase, University of Glasgow Peter Rodgers, University of Kent Gabriele Taentzer, Philipps-Universität Marburg Thomas Tensi, sd&m Proc. LED 2008 II / II