Increasing Comprehensibility of Object Models: Making the Roles of Attributes Explicit in UML Diagrams

UML contains a variety of diagram types for modeling objectoriented systems at various levels of abstraction. This paper describes how the comprehensibility of object models can be increased by augmenting UML diagrams with additional information about the behavior of attributes. A recent notion of “roles of variables” is used as the notation for describing the behavior. The increased comprehensibility of two diagram types, class diagrams and sequence diagrams, is demonstrated by examples where the added role information reveals the behavior of attributes in a compact manner.