Visual Tool Support for Scenario Based Software Engineering

This paper discusses how a CASE-tool supporting the Unified Modeling Language (UML) can be customized and extended using a visual scripting mechanism. We briefly introduce a set of UML model operations that can be used to transform a UML diagram of one type to another, and to perform set-theoretical operations on them. We discuss a visual scripting mechanism that can be used to combine these operations to construct new, higher-level functionality. The visual scripting mechanism allows the automation of often-repeated software engineering tasks. We further present examples of the usage of the proposed visual scripting techniques, applied for scenario based forward and reverse engineering tasks. We have a practical implementation integrated to a real-world UML modeling tool, the Nokia TED. The aim of this paper is to show how a visual language that uses simple operations may be used to compose useful high-level functions for forward and reverse engineering purposes.