CONTRACTUAL CONSISTENCY BETWEEN BON STATIC AND DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS

Model-Driven Development (MDD) is a new software development technique in which the primary software artifact is a model which is a collection of views. A model is more abstract than program code in traditional languages as it is closer to the problem domain and not tied to the underlying implementation platform. The main benefit of MDD is that models are executable and automatically translated to code. Current MDD tools (e.g. Rational Rose RealTime and BridgePoint) use the UML notions of structured classes and state machines for constructing models. However, many software developers prefer to also provide a dynamic object communication view of the product (e.g. using sequence diagrams). However, the problem then arises that the dynamic view might be inconsistent with the static class view. Current MDD tools do not provide support for executable dynamic diagrams or the consistency problems that may arise.