Model Refinements in the Object Oriented Software Development Process
Gabriela Alejandra Pérez, Roxana Silvia Giandini, Claudia Pons · El Servicio de Difusión de la Creación Intelectual (National University of La Plata) · 2002
In the UML specification document, several concepts are still described in an ambiguous, informal way. Such is the case of a dependency relationship between models known as: “Model Refinement”. Model Refinement is a dependency relationship that relates two elements that represent the same concept at different levels of abstraction. In order to avoid inconsistencies and wrong model interpretations, in this article we propose a formalization of the refinement relation between model elements of the same kind, such as refinement relation between Use Cases. Then on top of this formalization, we discuss refinement relation between models of different kind. The rules defined in this work form an enhancement of the UML metamodel specification. These rules should be used as a formal foundation for the construction of case tools performing consistency checking of models. Support offered by tools will improve the quality of software development process.