[Uml-devel] The best tool ever for modelling/validating for both developers and customers

[Rafael Fernández López]

Hi,

> What do you mean by "query"?
> By "object diagram", do you mean class diagram?
> Umbrello already has an option for displaying the methods in the
> class boxes on a class diagram.

Hehe, I'm glad you ask me this. No, I'm going to go a bit further:

On the class diagram, you model:

class Person
Attributes: age:int
Methods: isOld()

context Person::isOld():bool
pre true
body self.age > 70
post true

So, now we have a class with one attribute and one method written in OCL 
language. This code can actually be executed before going to the code itself 
in C++ (or any other implementation), so the customer could be able to do 
something like this:

- The customer creates an object diagram, in order to check if the program 
does what they actually expect in some corner cases. The object diagram has 
_instances_ of the classes, and you can actually query to the methods of 
those instances, so the customer could do:

Object p1:Person
age = 70

And now ask, p1.isOld(). The system should return false. Nice ! the 
implementation works as the customer expected. If it returned true because 
the developer wrote "body self.age >= 70", the customer should save this 
object diagram and tell the developer the problematic case.

On this line, you can do plenty of things, like for example (if we had a more 
complex structure):

self.isParentOf(p2.siblings()->select(s1,s2|s1<>s2 implies 
p2.siblings().......

Something like that, if for example our Person class had "isParentOf", 
and "siblings" methods (just an example). This is plain OCL, but it can be 
executed directly if we had the infraestructure for this.

The step from OCL code to actual code (C++ and the rest) is trivial, and you 
could have generated a pretty good part of your application, and of course in 
theory that part autogenerated should be almost perfect because the corner 
cases were tested by the customer.


Bye,
Rafael Fernández López

GPG Fingerprint: B9F4 4730 43F8 FFDD CC5E BA8E 724E 406E 3F01 D070
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/umbrello-devel/attachments/20080126/c095975a/attachment.sig>