Execution Constraint Verification of Exception Handling on UML Sequence Diagrams

Abstract

Exception handling alters the control flow of the program. As such, errors introduced in exception handling code may influence the overall program in undesired ways. To detect such errors early and thereby decrease the programming costs, it is worthwhile to consider exception handling at design level. Preferably, design models must be extended to incorporate exception handling behavior and the control flow must be verified accordingly. Common practices for verification require a formal model and semantics of the design. Defining semantics and manually converting design models to formal models are costly. We propose an approach for verifying exception handling in UML design models, where we extend UML with exception handling notations, define execution and exception handling semantics, and automatically transform UML models to a formal model. The formal model is used for generating execution paths. Constraints are specified (as temporal logic formulas) on execution paths and are verified.