Runtime Checking of UML Association-Related Constraints

UML class models are important design artifacts used as blueprints of software systems to be built. Yet, implementations are often inconsistent with their models. Although many techniques have been proposed to tackle this problem, some dynamic aspects of a class model are still hard to be verified using existing techniques. In this paper, we present an approach to checking the UML association-related constraints during a program's execution. Our approach instruments event notification mechanism into Java bytecode and verifies the constraints imposed by design-level associations (including compositions), when certain events occur. The empirical studies show that our approach can help efficiently detect inconsistencies between a UML class model and its implementation.