Abstract

While UML is often derided for “diagrams can mean anything you want”, there is a good sublanguage which can express design models at a level which admits formal program-like analysis. Inconsistencies in design models should be detected quickly and tracked continuously to save the engineer from unnecessary rework. Yet, existing tools are not capable of keeping up with the engineers’ rate of model changes. This talk presents an approach for quickly, correctly, and automatically reevaluating the consistency of a model after each model change. The approach does not require consistency rules with special annotations. Instead, it treats consistency rules as black-box entities and observes their behavior during (re)evaluation. The approach was implemented in the UML /Analyzer tool and evaluated on 29 small-to-large scale models. The evaluation showed 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.

Bio:

Dr. Alexander Egyed is a Principal Research Associate at the University College London and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. For the past 7 years, he worked for Teknowledge Corporation as a Research Scientist. He is currently in a transitional phase from industry to academia and will join the Johannes Kepler University, Austria as a Professor in March 2008. His research interests include requirements engineering, incremental and iterative software development (design and architecture), traceability, and simulation. He is a member of the IEEE , IEEE Computer Society, ACM , and ACM SIGSOFT . Contact him at University College London, Department of Computer Science, Room 6.20, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT or afegyed@gmail.com.