Model/analyzer: a tool for detecting, visualizing and fixing design errors in UML

Abstract

Integrated development environments are widely used in industry and support software engineers with instant error feedback about their work. Modeling tools often react to changes at a coarse level of granularity that make reasoning about errors inefficient and late. Furthermore, there is often a lack of appropriate visualizations of model errors and information on how to fix them. This paper presents the Model/Analyzer tool, an eclipse-based plug-in for the IBM Rational Software Modeler (RSM). The tool lets software engineers define arbitrary design rules and provides instant feedback on their validity in context of a model. Design errors are then visualized together with the information on what parts of the model contributed to them and how to fix them. The tool is fully automated and currently supports OCL and Java as languages for defining the design rules; and UML as the modeling language. The main benefit for the software engineer is the tool's incremental nature if providing instant feedback for many kinds of design errors even for large models.