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Authors: Alexander Egyed
Inconsistencies in design models should be detected immediately to save the
engineer from unnecessary rework. Yet, tools are not capable of keeping up
with the engineers' rate of model changes. This paper presents an approach for
quickly, correctly, and automatically deciding what consistency rules to
evaluate when a model changes. The approach does not require consistency rules
with special annotations. Instead, it treats consistency rules as black-box
entities and observes their behavior during their evaluation to identify what
model elements they access. The UML/Analyzer tool, integrated with IBM
Rational Rose , fully implements this approach. It was used to evaluate 29
models with tens-of-thousands of model elements, evaluated on 24 types of
consistency rules over 140,000 times. We found that the approach provided
design feedback correctly and required, in average, less than 9ms evaluation
time per model change with a worst case of less than 2 seconds at the expense
of a linearly increasing memory need. This is a significant improvement over
the state-of-the-art.
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