Change Management Framework to Support
UML Diagrams Changes
Bassam Rajabi and Sai Peck Lee
Faculty of
Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Malaysia
Abstract: An
effective change management technique is essential to keep track of changes and
to ensure that software projects are implemented in the most effective way. Unified Modeling Language (UML)
diagrams are widely adopted in software analysis and design. UML diagrams are
divided into different perspectives in modelling a problem domain. Preserving
the consistency among these diagrams is very crucial so that they can be
updated continuously to reflect software changes. In this research, a change management framework
is proposed to trace the dependency and to determine the effect of the change
in UML diagrams incrementally after each update operation. A set of 45 change
impact and traceability analysis templates for all types of change in UML
diagrams elements are proposed to detect the change affected and to maintain
the diagrams consistency and integrity. The proposed framework is modeled and
simulated using Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) formal language. UML is powerful in
describing the static and dynamic aspects of systems, but remains semi-formal
and lacks techniques for models validation and verification especially if these
diagrams updated continuously. Formal specifications and mathematical
foundations such as CPNs are used to automatically validate and verify the
behavior of the model. A new structure is proposed for the mutual integration
between UML and CPNs modeling languages to support model changes.
Keywords: Change impact, change management, traceability
analysis, unified modeling language, coloured petri nets.