Supporting change management of UML class diagrams

Abstract

Class diagram is an important model in object-oriented software development. A class diagram specifies the structure of a system with the system's classes, classes’ attributes and methods, and relations among classes. Sometimes class diagrams should be modified in accordance with requirements changes or correction of errors. In such a modification, careless mistakes may lead to include another error in the diagram. In this paper, we propose a method of visualization of the difference between original class diagram and modified one by emphasizing the difference in order to avoid newly produced errors. We illustrate our method with examples.