INCREASING COMPREHENSIBILITY OF OBJECT MODELS: MAKING THE ROLES OF ATTRIBUTES EXPLICIT IN UML DIAGRAMS

摘要

UML allows to produce and maintain object-oriented models of systems from different perspectives and view points using the notion of a diagram. This paper describes how the comprehensibility of models can be increased by augmenting some UML diagrams with additional information about the behavior oi' attributes. A recent notion of "roles of variables" is used to describe various behaviors. The increased comprehensibility of two diagram types, class diagrams and sequence diagrams, is demonstrated by examples where the added role information reveals the behavior of attributes in a compact manner.