These options are only available in the Slice perspective and are complementary to auto-partition and help to organize items on a dependency graph (diagram or matrix) by grouping them. This both reduces the complexity of the graph, and adds structural information.

However, where auto-partition is based on an analysis of the dependencies in the graph, group by parent and group by design ignore the dependencies and concentrate instead on the ancestry of the nodes in the graph:

• Group by parent always seeks the immediate parent of a node. So if the selected slice is at the class level, this will always group the class items by their package.
• Group by design selects the ancestors to use for grouping based on the design level approximately half-way between the selected level and the root.