Model Driven Development with Interactive Use Cases and UML Models

Large scale enterprise software systems are inherently complex and hard to maintain. To deal with this complexity, current mainstream software engineering practices aim at raising the level of abstraction to visual models described in OMG’s UML modeling language. Current UML tools, however, produce static design diagrams for documentation which quickly become out-ofsync with the software. To address this issue, modeldriven development approaches focus on software automation with generators that translate models into code. Unfortunately, automated code generation tends to emphasize “replacement” rather than “evolution”, and as a result, don’t integrate well with existing legacy code. This research investigates an alternative approach to model driven development using dynamic models developed interactively with existing code. We believe that such an approach provides better support for maintaining and evolving software by keeping models more in sync with code and focusing on code integration with models rather than model driven code generation.