Tool to Measure and Refactor Complex UML Models

Using UML modeling for designing a software product is heavily used by the industry. However the tool support for model based development have not reached the same level as the tool support of source code based development. Our goal was to provide a tool to support refactoring and static analysis of UML models, which were developed in the open source modeling framework, Papyrus [Papyrus 2014]. There are tools, such as EMF Refactor [Arendt et al. 2010], that targets refactoring of EMF models. This tool provides an extensible framework for defining EMF model transformations and also model metric calculations. Several class refactorings and metrics have been defined in EMF Refactor. Therefore we based our tool on this framework. The main contributions of our work are the followings. (i) We have built a refactoring tool for Papyrus models based on EMF Refactor. (ii) We have implemented several state machine based refactorings. (iii) We have defined well-known model complexity metrics for state machines and introduced some new metrics to measure the models. (iv) We have implemented bad smell detectors and refactorings to reduce the complexity of the models. The rest of this paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 we briefly introduce EMF Refactor and Papyrus. Section 3 illustrates the usage of our tool with an example at first, and then Sections 4, 5 and 6 present all of the features. Finally, Section 7 presents some related work and Section 8 concludes the paper.