Logical Approach: Consistency Rules between Activity Diagram and Class Diagram

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) is a fundamental in software development process. Requirements engineering encompasses activities ranging from requirements elicitation and analysis to specification, verification and validation. Poor requirements have been proved to be a major cause of software problems such as cost overruns, delivery delays, failure to meet expectation and degradation. Requirements validation especially models validation has gained quite an interest from a lot of researchers. In recent times, several researchers have expressed a great deal of interest in requirements validation, specifically models validation. The field of research related to consistency checking has undergone a considerable boom from time to time. Numerous methods, approaches and techniques have been recommended to address the requirements inconsistency issues, particularly in models validation. In the software development industry, UML modelling has been extensively used. The different forms of the UML model that characterise the system from various perspectives somehow establish a relation among the models to keep them inseparable from one another. This is the reason why the inconsistency becomes unavoidable. The inconsistency in the models arises when there is an overlap of the elements of the various models representing the different parts of the system and an absence of cooperation. In this paper, the emphasis is given on the consistency rules that exist between the two models. The focus is also on the class diagrams and activity, and the conversion of the rules into logical predicates, where the logical predicates are assessed with a sample case study that constitutes of the two models.