Transformation of UML Interaction Diagrams

Testing is an important means to ensure the quality of software systems. Contract specification can be used to formally specify the cluster level of object-oriented software, which can then be tested using TACCLE, an advanced methodology for object-oriented testing. The use of formal specifications as a testing base has many advantages. However, such specifications are not easily understood and therefore not widely used in the software industry. On the other hand, UML, a semi-formal modeling language, is becoming increasingly popular and widely accepted. In particular, UML interaction diagrams specify the dynamic, interacting behavior among the objects of an object-oriented system. If the transformation of UML interaction diagrams into Contract specifications can be automated, the TACCLE methodology can be applied directly to test object-oriented software at the cluster level. In this paper, a method to transform UML interaction diagrams into Contract specifications is proposed based on the UML metamodel. A prototype has been developed. _________________________________________________ © 2007 IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Personal use of this material is permitted. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. Manuscript received February 2007. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant #60173038, the Guangdong Province Science Foundation under Grant #010421, and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong under CERG Grant #714504. Huo Yan Chen and Chuang Li are with the Department of Computer Science, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China (phone and fax: +86 20 8522 0226, e-mail: [email protected]). T.H. Tse is with the Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong (e-mail: [email protected]).