Visualising Action Contracts in ObjectOriented Modelling.pdfVIP

Final version in IEE Proceedings Software, 145, 2-3 Visualising Action Contracts in Object-Oriented Modelling Stuart Kent Joseph (Yossi) Gil Division of Computing, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, University of Brighton, Lewes Rd., Brighton, UK. P.O. Box 704, http://www.it.brighton.ac.uk/staff/Stuart.Kent/ Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA. Stuart.Kent@brighton.ac.uk yogi@ stuart@ yogi@cs.technion.ac.il fax: ++44 1273 642405, tel: ++44 1273 642494 Abstract. In recent years a number of OO methods have been enhanced with textual, mathematical languages for specifying invariants and action contracts (pre and post conditions). This paper builds on a recent proposal for “constraint diagrams”, a diagrammatic notation allowing the expression of such assertions. Constraint diagrams essentially provide a pictorial representation of navigation expressions, specifically the sets of objects they define, and, using Venn diagrams and other techniques, constraints on the cardinalities of and relationships between those sets. The original proposal focused on the use of constraint diagrams for depicting invariants. This paper focuses on their use in depicting action contracts. 1 Introduction Diagrammatic notations for software modelling are currently being standardised under the Unified Modelling Language banner (UML Consortium, 1997). UML derives much of its inheritance by the advances made in Object-Oriented Software Modelling, in particular the OMT (Rumbaugh et al., 1991) and Booch (Booch, 1991) methods. However, it has long been recognised that these notations are not sufficiently expressive without the inclusion of some textual annotation language. A number of methods,