Quality (philosophy)

Philosophy

Unified Modeling Language

Data mining

Computer science

Class diagram

Applications of UML

Sequence diagram

Software quality

Software

Object Constraint Language

Epistemology

Artificial intelligence

Software engineering

Programming language

Consistency (knowledge bases)

Software development

UML tool

International Journal of Information Management

Unified Modeling Language (UML) has become the de-facto standard to design today's large-size object-oriented systems. However, focusing on multiple UML diagrams is a main cause of breaching the consistency problem, which ultimately reduces the overall software model's quality. Consistency management techniques are widely used to ensure the model consistency by correct model-to-model and model-to-code transformation. Consistency management becomes a promising area of research especially for model-driven architecture. In this paper, we extensively review UML consistency management techniques. The proposed techniques have been classified based on the parameters identified from the research literature. Moreover, we performed a qualitative comparison of consistency management techniques in order to identify current research trends, challenges and research gaps in this field of study. Based on the results, we concluded that researchers have not provided more attention on exploring inter-model and semantic consistency problems. Furthermore, state-of-the-art consistency management techniques mostly focus only on three UML diagrams (i.e., class, sequence and state chart) and the remaining UML diagrams have been overlooked. Consequently, due to this incomplete body of knowledge, researchers are unable to take full advantage of overlooked UML diagrams, which may be otherwise useful to handle the consistency management challenge in an efficient manner.

UML models consistency management: Guidelines for software quality manager