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[Download PDF here!]
Authors: Alexander
Egyed and David S. Wile
The
desirability of maintaining multiple stakeholders’ interests during
the software design process argues for leaving choices undecided as
long as possible. Yet, any form of underspecification, either
missing information or undecided choices, must be resolved before
automated analysis tools can be used. This paper demonstrates how
Constraint Satisfaction Problem Solution Techniques (CSTs) can be
used to automatically reduce the space of choices for ambiguities by
incorporating the local effects of constraints, ultimately with more
global consequences. As constraints typical of those encountered
during the software design process, we use UML consistency and
well-formedness rules. It is somewhat surprising that CSTs are
suitable for the software modeling domain since the constraints may
relate many ambiguities during their evaluation, encountering a
well-known problem with CSTs called the k-consistency problem. This
paper demonstrates that our CST-based approach is computationally
scalable and effective—as evidenced by empirical experiments based
on dozens of industrial models. |
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