Incremental UML for agile development with PREXEL

Abstract

UML creates useful visualizations but they become monolithic, complex, and expensive to maintain. In agile development, documentation is secondary, which discourages the use of UML even further. We introduce an in-code, just-in-time, maintainable approach to UML, supported by a tool called PREXEL. PREXEL minimizes interruptions in coding by allowing concise in-line specifications which automatically synthesize in-code graphical ASCII class models, class and method skeletons, and class relationships.