An Approach to Checking Consistency between UML Class Model and Its Java Implementation

Model Driven Engineering (MDE) aims to expedite the software development process by providing support for transforming models to running systems. Many modeling tools provide forward engineering features, which automatically translate a model into a skeletal program that developers must complete. Inconsistencies between a design model and its implementation, however, can arise, particularly when a final implementation is developed dependently on the code from which it was generated. Manually checking that an implementation conforms to its model is a daunting task. Thus, an MDE tool that developers can use to check that implementations conform to their models can significantly improve a developer's productivity. This paper presents a model-based approach for testing whether or not an implementation satisfies the constraints imposed by its design model. Our model-based testing approach aims to efficiently reduce the test input space while supporting branch coverage criteria. To evaluate the approach's ability to uncover inconsistencies, we developed a prototypical tool and applied it to the Eclipse UML2 projects. We were able to uncover inconsistencies between the models and their implementations using the tool.