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Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems, Volume 9

Position Papers of the 2016 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems

From UML State Machine to code and back again!

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2016F485

Citation: Position Papers of the 2016 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, M. Ganzha, L. Maciaszek, M. Paprzycki (eds). ACSIS, Vol. 9, pages 283–290 ()

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Abstract. UML state machines and their visual representations are much more suitable to describe logical behaviors of system entities than equivalent text based description such as IF-THEN-ELSE or SWITH-CASE constructions. Although many industrial tools and research prototypes can generate executable code from such a graphical language, generated code could be manually modified by programmers. After code modifications, round-trip engineering is needed to make the model and code consistent, which is a critical aspect to meet quality and performance constraint required for software systems. Unfortunately, current UML tools only support structural concepts for round-trip engineering such as those available from class diagrams. In this paper, we address the round-trip engineering of UML state-machine and its related generated code. We propose an approach consisting of a forward process which generates code by using transformation patterns, and a backward process which is based on code pattern detection to update the original state machine model from the modified code. We implemented a prototype and conducted several experiments on different aspects of the round-trip engineering to verify the proposed approach.

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