Instant consistency checking for the UML

ABSTRACT

Inconsistencies in design models should be detected immediately to save the engineer from unnecessary rework. Yet, tools are not capable of keeping up with the engineers' rate of model changes. This paper presents an approach for quickly, correctly, and automatically deciding what consistency rules to evaluate when a model changes. The approach does not require consistency rules with special annotations. Instead, it treats consistency rules as black-box entities and observes their behavior during their evaluation to identify what model elements they access. The UML/Analyzer tool, integrated with IBM Rational Rose™, fully implements this approach. It was used to evaluate 29 models with tens-of-thousands of model elements, evaluated on 24 types of consistency rules over 140,000 times. We found that the approach provided design feedback correctly and required, in average, less than 9ms evaluation time per model change with a worst case of less than 2 seconds at the expense of a linearly increasing memory need. This is a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art.

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Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Designing software

      • Software implementation planning

        • Software design techniques

    • Software development process management