Validation: Conceptual versus Activity Diagram Approaches

Abstract

A conceptual model is used to support development and design within the area of systems and software modeling. The notion of validation refers to representing a domain in a model accurately and generating results using an executable model. In UML specifications, validation verifies the correctness of UML diagrams against any constraints and rules defined within the model. Currently, significant research has been conducted on generating test sets to validate that UML diagrams conform to requirements. UML activity diagrams are a specific focus of such efforts. An activity diagram is a flexible instrument for describing a system’s behaviors and the internal logic of complex operations. This paper focuses on the notion of validation using activity diagrams and contrasts that process with a proposed method that involves an informal validation procedure. Accordingly, this informal validation involves comparing requirements to specifications expressed by a diagram of a modeling language called thinging machine (TM) modeling. The informal validation is a type of model checking that requires the model to be small enough for the verification to be done in a limited space or time period. In the proposed method, the model diagram is divided into subdiagrams to achieve this purpose. We claim the TM behavioral model comes with a particular dispositional structure that allows a designer to “carve” a model into smaller components for informal validation, which is shown through two case studies.