A tool for visual and formal modelling of software designs

Amálio, Nuno; Glodt, Christian

doi:10.1016/j.scico.2014.05.002

Cited by 9 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The tool paved the way to the use of VCL for coursework and student projects (Leemans and Amálio 2012a;Tobias et al 2012), brought the language to life, and made the experiment presented here possible. Empirical results on modelling tools, emerging from a spin-off survey of the experiment presented here, highlighted that both VCL and its tool were being positively received by users (Amálio and Glodt 2015).…”

Section: Vcl's Trajectory Founding Ideas and Suitability As Visual Nmentioning

confidence: 81%

“…A major influence was the development of VCL's aspect-oriented modelling approach . Once VCL had been developed as a concept, we embarked upon the construction of VCL's tool, the Visual Contract Builder (VCB), 3 which made VCL more tangible and firmly defined Amálio and Glodt 2015). The tool paved the way to the use of VCL for coursework and student projects (Leemans and Amálio 2012a;Tobias et al 2012), brought the language to life, and made the experiment presented here possible.…”

Section: Vcl's Trajectory Founding Ideas and Suitability As Visual Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An experimental scrutiny of visual design modelling: VCL up against UML+OCL

2019

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The graphical nature of prominent modelling notations, such as the standards UML and SysML, enables them to tap into the cognitive benefits of diagrams. However, these notations hardly exploit the cognitive potential of diagrams and are only partially graphical with invariants and operations being expressed textually. The Visual Contract Language (VCL) aims at improving visual modelling; it tries to (a) maximise diagrammatic cognitive effectiveness, (b) increase visual expressivity, and (c) level of rigour and formality. It is an alternative to UML that does largely pictorially what is traditionally done textually. The paper presents the results of a controlled experiment carried out four times in different academic settings and involving 43 participants, which compares VCL against UML and OCL and whose goal is to provide insight on benefits and limitations of visual modelling. The paper's hypotheses are evaluated using a crossover design with the following tasks: (i) modelling of state space, invariants and operations, (ii) comprehension of modelled problem, (iii) detection of model defects and (iv) comprehension of a given model. Although visual approaches have been used and advocated for decades, this is the first empirical investigation looking into the effects of graphical expression of invariants and operations on modelling and model usage tasks. Results suggest VCL benefits in defect detection, model comprehension, and modelling of operations, providing some empirical evidence on the benefits of graphical software design.

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Section: Vcl's Trajectory Founding Ideas and Suitability As Visual Nmentioning

confidence: 81%

Section: Vcl's Trajectory Founding Ideas and Suitability As Visual Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

An experimental scrutiny of visual design modelling: VCL up against UML+OCL

2019

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“…FRAGMENTA can also be used as a modularity paradigm with the notions of cluster and fragments realised in its many guises. VCL's [7], [8] modularity mechanisms resemble FRAGMENTA. In VCL, FRAGMENTA's clusters are packages and fragments are VCL diagrams.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The real world. Our case studies [4] include the industrial language used here and several examples drawn from VCL [7], [8], a medium sized modelling language. FRAGMENTA's SGs are an abstraction of MDE structural models, supporting inheritance, composition and multiplicities.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fragmenta: A theory of fragmentation for MDE

Amálio

Lara

Guerra

2015

2015 ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS)

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Esta es la versión de autor de la comunicación de congreso publicada en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: Abstract-Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) promotes models throughout development. However, models may become large and unwieldy even for small to medium-sized systems. This paper tackles the MDE challenges of model complexity and scalability. It proposes FRAGMENTA, a theory of modular design that breaks down overall models into fragments that can be put together to build meaningful wholes, in contrast to classical MDE approaches that are essentially monolithic. The theory is based on an algebraic description of models, fragments and clusters based on graphs and morphisms. The paper's novelties include: (i) a mathematical treatment of fragments and a seaming mechanism of proxies to enable inter-fragment referencing, (ii) fragmentation strategies, which prescribe a fragmentation structure to model instances, (iii) FRAGMENTA's support for both top-down and bottom-up design, and (iv) our formally proved result that shows that inheritance hierarchies remain well-formed (acyclic) globally when fragments are composed provided some local fragment constraints are met.

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“…Some industrial tools such as NuSMV [37], PAT [38], Spin [39], and UPPAAL [40] are well-known for analyzing the system behavior correctness [41][42][43]. But, these tools have some limitations such as weak graphical user interface, the complexity of programming language and generating the automated temporal specification rules for verifying the system behavior [44][45][46][47]. To illustrate the temporal logic formulas, some model checkers such as NuSMV have supported the generated specification rules in forms of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) and Computation Tree Logic (CTL) [17,37,[48][49][50].…”

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confidence: 99%

A symbolic model checking approach in formal verification of distributed systems

Souri

Rahmani

Navimipour

et al. 2019

Hum. Cent. Comput. Inf. Sci.

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Today, distributed systems have developed complex components more and more [1, 2]. By increasing performance of complex systems such as service composition [3], task scheduling [4] and fault tolerance [5], simulation analysis cannot evaluate entire of the system levels [6, 7]. Also, the simulation results are rested to some design under test platforms [8] that omit the part of the existing state space of the system [9]. Formal verification is a mathematically correctness provable approach for the complex distributed systems which is well-suitable for NP-hard problems [10, 11]. Recent scientific studies analyzed their case studies using mathematical verification approaches such as model

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A tool for visual and formal modelling of software designs

Cited by 9 publications

References 29 publications

An experimental scrutiny of visual design modelling: VCL up against UML+OCL

An experimental scrutiny of visual design modelling: VCL up against UML+OCL

Fragmenta: A theory of fragmentation for MDE

A symbolic model checking approach in formal verification of distributed systems

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