Abstract
The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is the standard for designing and documenting object-oriented software systems. Its most frequent use is for static modelling in the form of class diagrams. A correlated concept is that of object diagrams. An object diagram may or may not adhere to a given class diagram, and the understanding of this connection is key to correctly using class diagrams in practice. We present an approach for automatic generation of verified, non-trivial, conceptually relevant examples and counterexamples of class/object diagram combinations, aimed at providing exercise tasks in a university course setting. The underlying technique is model instance finding using the Alloy specification language and analyser. We provide an implementation of our approach in an e-learning system.
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Notes
- 1.
That involves variants of the stuff shown and elided in Fig. 7, e.g., definitions
etc., while for the predicate
considered in a moment, separate variants
etc. would be produced. - 2.
For example, can you spot which of the five ODs in Fig. 1 do not conform to either of the two CDs given there?
- 3.
By happenstance, they could also be identical, but that would be detected and rejected in a later step.
- 4.
This is also the step where we would reject the case that CD1 and CD2 happened to be identical. For if they were, then the first two buckets,
as well as
, would be empty, and it would be impossible to choose five ODs from the remaining two buckets while not taking more than two from one bucket.
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Kafa, V., Siegburg, M., Voigtländer, J. (2020). Exercise Task Generation for UML Class/Object Diagrams, via Alloy Model Instance Finding. In: Tait, B., Kroeze, J., Gruner, S. (eds) ICT Education. SACLA 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1136. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35629-3_8
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