Improving the Capabilities and Applicability of Umple

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In this work we will enable practitioners and students to develop better software by blending easy-to-use model-driven engineering with software engineering techniques such as agile methods and test-driven development. We will achieve this by continued work on Umple, a textual modeling technology that works seamlessly with existing programming languages and generates fully functional systems, diagrams, documentation and analysis results. Umple is textual because most programmers prefer to develop textually, and we want to be able to blend modeling into their work and thus encourage the use of modeling. Umple generates diagrams dynamically to facilitate analysis and understanding of models. Umple comprehensively incorporates Unified-Modeling Language (UML) modeling elements including class diagrams, composite structure diagrams and state machines. We have conducted empirical studies that have shown that Umple is easy to use. It is being used in both academic and industrial environments. In the proposed work we will 1) improve Umple’s real-time code generation, particularly for concurrent, distributed composite structure models; 2) improve its separation-of-concerns mechanisms, particularly traits, variants and their synergies; 3) incorporate the requirements modeling standard GRL; and 4) enhance model analysis and validation. We will also continue to enhance Umple’s debugging capability, and integration with other tools such as Papyrus. As case studies, we will apply our work to two domains: 1) Enterprise models for municipalities and universities, 2) Small autonomous model cars based on Arduino processors with CAN networking and various sensors (cameras with scene analysis and Lidar). The Umple-based platform will allow groups of researchers and even undergraduate or high-school students to explore different architectures and algorithms for autonomous driving. As with much of our recent research, we will follow a design-science approach, exploring opportunities that arise as we improve the design of both Umple itself and the software being developed in the above case studies. We will also conduct studies of users actually using Umple. Development of Umple will continue to be performed in a fully agile open-source manner, using model-driven development (Umple is developed in itself), test-driven development and continuous integration. The Umple project itself will continue to serve as a teaching tool for how to run a software engineering project.