Supporting the Composition of UML Component Diagrams

Abstract

Fast-changing business environments have become enterprise information systems more heterogeneous and complex. This extreme uncertainty leads to continuous development and integration of architecturally relevant components developed in parallel. In this context, the proper composition of such components is critical to reduce the development effort. However, the current composition tools are still considered imprecise and inflexible for this purpose. This article, therefore, proposes MoCoTo, a model composition tool to support the integration of UML component diagrams. It exploits equivalence relationships between the UML component elements to improve integration precision and accuracy. Developers and system analysts can benefit from using MoCoTo when evolving or maintaining architectural models of enterprise information systems. MoCoTo was implemented as an Eclipse platform plug-in. The tool was used to support the composition of architectural components in three realistic evolution scenarios of a Software Product Line. Our preliminary results indicated that MoCoTo was able to integrate architectural models represented with UML component diagrams. The metrics used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed tool (i.e., precision, recall and F-measure) presented values higher than 0.6 in all evaluation scenarios.