MAS — an interactive synthesizer to support behavioral modelling in UML

  • Authors:

  • Erkki Mäkinen;Tarja Systä

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer and Information Sciences, P.O.Box 607, FIN-33014 University of Tampere, Finland;Tampere University of Technology, Software Systems Laboratory, P.O. Box 553, FIN-33101 Tampere, Finland

  • Venue:
  • ICSE '01 Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Minimally Adequate Synthesizer (MAS) is an interactive algorithm that synthesizes UML statechart diagrams from sequence diagrams. It follows Angluin's framework of minimally adequate teacher to infer the desired statechart diagram by consulting the user. To minimize the consultations needed, MAS keeps track of the interaction with the user. Together with its general knowledge about sequence diagrams, this makes MAS to operate mostly without user's help, but allowing her to guide the process in the critical points.In this paper we discuss the MAS algorithm and its practical implementation, integrated with a real-world UML modeling tool, the Nokia TED. Moreover, we discuss the interaction between the algorithm and the user as a medium of improving the algorithm and further decreasing the amount of user consultations needed. Furthermore, we show how MAS can be used to incrementally synthesize sequence diagrams into an edited or a manually constructed statechart diagram.Totally automatic synthesis algorithms may result in a state machine that contains undesired generalizations. Because MAS consults the user during the synthesis process, the user can be confident that such generalizations do not appear in the resulting statechart diagram.