Traceability Across Refinement Steps in UML Modeling

Documenting the refinement relationship between layers allows developers to verify whether the code meets its specification or not, trace the impact of changes in the business goals and execute test assertions written in terms of abstract model’s vocabulary by translating them to the concrete model’s vocabulary. Refinement has been studied in many formal notations such as Z and B and in different contexts, but there is still a lack of formal definitions of refinement in semi-formal languages, such as the UML. The contribution of this article is to clarify the abstraction/refinement relationship between UML models, providing basis for tools supporting the refinement driven modeling process. We formally describe a number of refinement patterns and present PAMPERO, a tool integrated in the Eclipse environment, based on the formal definition of model refinement.