MULTI-VIEW CONSISTENCY CHECKING OF BON SOFTWARE DESCRIPTION DIAGRAMS

Copyright Page (ii — not typed) iii Certificate Page (iii — not typed) iv Multi-View Consistency is an important aspect of current Model Driven Develop-ment (MDD) methods for software construction. A model may consist of many views. We need some assurance that these views are consistent. Yet, none of the current MDD tools provide any justification that the generated code is consistent. The current genera-tion of MDD tools also do not support code generation based on dynamic diagrams and contracts, so that consistency of static and dynamic diagrams is an unexplored territory. In this thesis we describe a first (to our knowledge) prototype multi-view consistency checking tool. We first formalize the notion consistency(v1,v2) of two views v1 (a static view with contracts) and v2 (a dynamic view) of a model, based on prior work by Paige and Ostroff in [ 1; 14]. The definition of consistency (which is more comprehensive than the earlier work) is divided into syntactic and contractual consistency. We then develop algorithms to check syntactic consistency, and incorporate these algorithms in a new tool called the BON Consistency Checking Tool (BCCT). The tool can be used to construct graphical models, features, contracts and detailed body code and automatically run the syntactic consistency tests. The model can be auto-matically translated to executable Eiffel code, and a testdriver is used to check contractual consistency. The tool can be used to interactively and repeatedly construct models, automatically test for consistency and refactor the models as required. This leads to a design method that we call Consistency Driven Development (CDD)