Defining and Qualifying Components in the Design Phase

Component based development in the design phase necessitates a comprehensive look at both static and dynamic UML views. If a design is to incorporate third-party components, one must define component interfaces. We propose a method for defining components in the design phase that can be used for qualification purposes. Coupling and frequency metrics are used to make component definition decisions. Component interface definitions allow for qualifying candidate components. 1

Rigorous testing by merging structural and behavioral UML representations

Abstract. Error detection and correction in the design phase can reduce total costs and time to market. Yet, testing of design models usually consists of walk-throughs and inspections both of which lack the rigor of systematic testing. Test adequacy criteria for UML models help define necessary objectives during the process of test creation. These test criteria require coverage of various parts of UML models, such as structural (Class Diagram) and behavioral (Sequence Diagram) views. Test criteria are specific to a particular UML view. Test cases on the other hand should cover parts of multiple views. To understand testing needs better, it is useful to be able to observe the effect of tests on both Class Diagrams and Sequence Diagrams. We propose a new graph that encapsulates the many paths that exist between objects via their method calls as a directed acyclic graph (OMDAG). We also introduce the object method execution table (OMET) that captures both execution sequence and associated attribute values by merging the UML views. The merging process is defined in an algorithm that generates and executes tests.

Orest Pilskalns. iii AN INTEGRATED UML BASED MODEL FOR DESIGN ANALYSIS Abstract

In software engineering, there is a strong movement towards “Design First ” and “Test Driven Development”. With these approaches it is imperative to ensure that design documents are valid and consistent both internally and externally. This thesis discusses the current state of design testing documents for validity and proposes a new approach. Although much research effort has been dedicated to software design validation, none of the current solutions provide an effective, efficient, and automatic approach that includes a wide variety of UML design document types. To remedy this, we present an new approach which attempts to address the downfalls of the other solutions. To demonstrate this approach we apply our techniques to a case study. The case study is based around designing a canonical web application for blogging. By first designing the project in a variety of UML design documents and then running those documents through our proposed approach, we were able to pinpoint numerous design faults and inconsistencies between the diagrams. Using our approach, software faults are discovered early in the development lifecycle and therefore reduce software maintenance time and costs overall