Checking the Correspondence between UML Models and Implementation

UML class and sequence diagrams are used as the basis for runtime profiling along with either offline or online analysis to determine whether the execution conforms to the diagrams. Situations where sequence diagrams are intended to characterize all possible executions are described. The approach generates an execution tree of all possible sequences, using a detailed collection of graph transformations that represent a precise operational semantics for sequence diagrams, including treatment for polymorphism, multiple activations, reference to other diagrams, and the use of frames in sequence diagrams. The sequence diagrams are also used to determine the information that should be gathered about method calls in the system. Aspects that can follow the flow of messages in a distributed system, are generated and the results of execution are recorded. The execution tree is used to automatically check the recorded execution to detect operations that do not correspond to any of the diagrams. These represent either new types of sequence diagrams that should be added to the collection, or implementation errors where the system is not responding as designed. In either case, it is important to identify such situations.