Deriving Operation Contracts from UML Class Diagrams

Abstract

Class diagrams must be complemented with a set of system operations that describes how users can modify and evolve the system state. To be useful, such a set must be complete (i.e. through these operations, users should be able to modify the population of all elements in the class diagram) and executable (i.e. for each operation, there must exist a system state over which the operation can be successfully applied). Manual specification of these operations is an error-prone and time-consuming activity. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to automatically provide a basic set of system operations that verify these two properties. Operations are drawn from the elements (classes, attributes, etc) of the class diagram and take into account the possible dependencies between the different change events (i.e. inserts/updates/deletes) that may be applied to them. Afterwards, the designer could reuse our proposal to build up more complex operations.

Verifying Action Semantics Specifications in UML Behavioral Models

“…Table 1 provides the rules to compute the dependencies for each kind of action, linked with the AND and OR operators, if necessary. These rules are adapted from [4]. The third column (Shareable) determines, for each dependency, if two or more dependee actions can be mapped (i.e.…”

“…In the following, we present an algorithm for determining the weak executability of an execution path path on a class diagram cd. For non-executable paths, the algorithm returns a set of possible repair action alternatives (output parameter requiredActions) that could be included in the path to make it executable 4 . Roughly, the algorithm works by executing two loops 5 .…”

Drawing Preconditions of Operation Contracts from Conceptual Schemas

“…In this context, we may find several proposals that provide an automatic definition of the basic operations (such as entity insertion or deletion, attribute modification, etc.) from a conceptual schema which allow updating the contents of the IB [3,4,5,6]. Their main drawback is that either they do not take into account the integrity constraints to be preserved during the automatic generation of the operations or they consider them only up to a limited extent.…”