Abstract: Inconsistencies in design models should be detected immediately to save the engineer from unnecessary rework. Yet, tools are not capable of keeping up with the engineers' rate of model changes. This talk presents an approach for quickly, correctly, and automatically deciding what consistency rules to evaluate when a model changes. The approach does not require consistency rules with special annotations. Instead, it treats consistency rules as black-box entities and observes their behavior during their evaluation to identify what model elements they access. The approach was implemented in the UML/Analyzer tool and evaluated on 29 models. The evaluation showed that the approach provided design feedback correctly and required, in average, less than 9ms evaluation time per model change with a worst case of less than 2 seconds at the expense of a linearly increasing memory need.

Short Bio: Dr. Egyed is a research scientist at Teknowledge Corporation and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California (USC). He received his Doctorate degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2000. His focus of interest is on software modeling and includes model analysis, synthesis, transformation, and traceability. Dr. Egyed is a member of the ACM, ACM SigSoft, IEEE, and IEEE Computer Society.