LFCS Seminar

Exploration games for UML software design

Jennifer Tenzer

LFCS, School of Informatics, U. of Edinburgh

4pm Tuesday 31st January 2006
Room 2511, JCMB, King's Buildings

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Abstract

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has become the standard language for the design of object-oriented software systems over the past decade. Even though there exist various tools which support design with UML, their functionality is usually focused on drawing UML diagrams and generating code from the UML model. They do not help the designer in exploring different design decisions and working out which is the best option.

In my PhD thesis I have developed concepts for UML design tools which assist the modeller in improving the system design and specification incrementally. The foundation of this approach is a variant of formal games called "exploration games", which may be defined on the basis of incomplete or imprecise UML models. The designer repeatedly plays an exploration game to detect flaws or incompleteness in the design and its specification, which are both incorporated in the game definition. At any time during a play the game definition can be incremented by the modeller. This allows him to react to the discoveries made in previous moves and experiment with new design solutions.

In this talk I will give an overview on exploration games and their application to UML. Furthermore I will demonstrate the prototype tool GUIDE, which illustrates how these ideas can be put into practice