The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has quickly become the industry standard for object-oriented software development. It is being widely used in organizations and institutions around the world. However, UML is often found to be too complex for novice systems analysts. Although prior research has identified difficulties novice analysts encounter in learning UML, no viable solution has been proposed to address these difficulties. Sequence-diagram modeling, in particular, has largely been overlooked. The sequence diagram models the behavioral aspects of an object-oriented software system in terms of interactions among its building blocks, i.e. objects and classes. It is one of the most commonly-used UML diagrams in practice. However, there has been little research on sequence-diagram modeling. The current literature scarcely provides effective guidelines for developing a sequence diagram. Such guidelines will be greatly beneficial to novice analysts who, unlike experienced systems analysts, do not possess relevant prior experience to easily learn how to develop a sequence diagram. There is the need for an effective sequence-diagram modeling technique for novices. This dissertation reports a research study that identified novice difficulties in modeling a sequence diagram and proposed a technique called CHOP (CHunking, Ordering, Patterning), which was designed to reduce the cognitive load by addressing the cognitive complexity of sequence-diagram modeling. The CHOP technique was evaluated in a controlled experiment against a technique recommended in a well-known textbook, which was found to be representative of approaches provided in many textbooks as well as practitioner literatures. The results indicated that novice analysts were able to perform better using the CHOP technique. This outcome seems have been enabled by pattern-based heuristics provided by the technique. Meanwhile, novice analysts rated the CHOP technique more useful although not significantly easier to use than the control technique. The study established that the CHOP technique is an effective sequence-diagram modeling technique for novice analysts.

Maintaining large-scale legacy applications has been a major challenge for software producers. As the application evolves and gets more complicated, it becomes harder to understand, debug, or modify the code. Moreover, as new members are joining the development team, and others are leaving, the need for a well-documented code arises. Good documentation necessitates the visualization of the code in an easy to understand manner. The Unified Modeling Language (UML), an Object Management Group's (OMG) standard, is a graphical modeling language used for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting software intensive artifacts. UML, which has been accepted as an industry standard in November 1997, has aided the design and maintenance of object-oriented legacy applications. While the software developers were building UML models for their existing applications as part of a reverse-engineering process, development of next generation software applications started from the models (forward-engineering process). In the forward engineering process, the system's code is specified and constructed from the UML models, which evolve as the system evolves in order to maintain consistent documentation and visualization of the system. Moreover, UML has the power of hiding unnecessary details of the system by the ability to model its different views. This enables visualizing the system at different levels of hierarchy. This thesis documents how to use UML to model a software-intensive simulation for the combat systems of a fully automated naval "digital ship". This process started with building the use case diagrams based on the system requirements given by the domain experts. Then activity diagrams were used to describe the exact performance of the use cases. The logical view of the system was built using class, interaction, and activity diagrams. Then, the physical view of the system was built using component diagrams. Finally, an example of the code generation process from the UML models was carried out for one of the system components. These models are to be maintained as the application evolves. Using UML has aided in building a well-structured object-oriented application, validating the use cases of the application with the domain experts, visualizing and validating the structure of the source code before writing it, communicating between different members of the development team, and providing an easily understandable documentation of the system. / Master of Science

A indústria de desenvolvimento de software está em constante evolução e em busca de novos desafios, como por exemplo: novas tecnologias, linguagens de programação e estratégias para aumentar a produtividade no desenvolvimento. Com o passar do tempo, essa evolução desejada tem se concretizado, em especial com o surgimento de conceitos como Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) e Model-Driven Development (MDD). Nesse contexto, ganha importância a reutilização de software, por exemplo por meio do uso de serviços que facilitam a interoperabilidade entre diferentes sistemas. Ambientes de desenvolvimento de software, em especial ambientes de reúso de software, poderiam se adequar à arquitetura SOA para facilitar a disponibilização de serviços a outros ambientes, promovendo sua integração e aumentando a possibilidade de reúso. Após um levantamento bibliográfico sobre ambientes integrados de reúso que utilizassem serviços para permitir o compartilhamento de recursos, percebeu-se que os trabalhos nessa direção são poucos. Ao mesmo tempo, observou-se que para integração de sistemas por meio de serviços é necessário criar camadas de acesso às entidades dos sistemas que compartilharão informações. A implementação desses serviços de forma manual é repetitiva e sujeita a erros, principalmente por programadores que não estão familiarizados com SOA. Por outro lado, diagramas de classes em UML (Unified Modeling Language) são de amplo conhecimento por parte de desenvolvedores e estão em um nível de abstração que é suficientemente detalhado para permitir a derivação de serviços de acesso às suas classes. Desta forma, para atender uma demanda crescente de sistemas que precisam oferecer serviços para possibilitar sua integração com outros sistemas, este mestrado tem por objetivo promover a geração automatizada de código de serviços por meio de transformações de modelo para texto, em que o modelo de entrada é um diagrama de classes derivado da UML e os serviços gerados cobrem operações básicas do tipo CRUD. O gerador resultante foi validado por meio de duas provas de conceito e mostrou-se adequado para cumprir os objetivos estabelecidos, visto que o desenvolvedor trabalha com um modelo em alto nível de abstração, não precisando conhecer os detalhes inerentes à implementação dos serviços. / The software development industry is constantly evolving and looking for challenges, such as: new technologies, programming languages and strategies to increase developers productivity. During the course of time, this required evolution has been concretized, especially with the emergency of concepts such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Model-Driven Development (MDD). In this context, software reuse gains importance, for example through the use of services that ease the interoperability of different systems. Software development environments, in special reuse environments, could be adapted to the SOA architecture to ease the availability of services to other environments, thus promoting its integration and possibility of reuse. After a literature review about integrated reuse environments that use services to allow resources sharing, it has been observed that there are only a few works in this direction. At the same time, it was observed that for system integration through services it is required to create an access layer for the system entities that share information. The manual implementation of these services is repetitive and error prone, especially for programmers who are not familiar with SOA. On the other hand, UML (Unified Modeling Language) class diagrams are widely known by developers and are at a level of abstraction that is sufficiently detailed to allow the derivation of access services to their classes. Thus, to meet a growing demand for systems that need to provide services to enable its integration with other systems, this masters dissertation aims to promote the automated generation of service code through transformations from model to text, where the input model is a class diagram derived from UML, and the generated services cover the basic CRUD operations. The resulting generator has been validated through two proofs of concepts and was adequate to meet the stated objectives, as the developer works with a model in a high abstraction level, and does not need to know the details related with the service implementation.

Managing, handling, exchanging and accessing hydrogeological information depend mainly on the applied hydrogeological data models, which differ between institutions and across countries. Growing interest in hydrogeological information diffusion, combined with a need for information availability, require the convergence of hydrogeological data models. Model convergence makes hydrogeological information accessible to multiple institutions, universities, administration, water suppliers, and research organisations, at different levels: from the local level (on-site measurement teams), to national and international institutions dealing with water resources management. Furthermore, because hydrogeological studies are complex, they require a large variety of high-quality hydrogeological data with appropriate metadata in clearly designed and coherent structures. To respond to the requirement of model convergence, easy information exchange and hydrogeological completeness, new data models have been developed, using two different methodologies. At local-regional level, the HydroCube model has been developed for the Walloon Region in Belgium. This logical data model uses entity-relationship diagrams and it has been implemented in the MS Access environment, further enriched with a fully functional user-interface. The HydroCube model presents an innovative holistic project-based approach, which covers a full set of hydrogeological concepts and features, allowing for effective hydrogeological project management. This approach enables to store data about the project localisation, hydrogeological equipment, related observations and measurements. Furthermore, topological relationships facilitate management of spatially associated data. Finally, the model focuses on specialized hydrogeological field experiments, such as pumping tests and tracer tests. At the international level, a new hydrogeological data model has been developed which guarantees hydrogeological information availability in one standard format in the scope of the FP6 project GABARDINE (Groundwater Artificial recharge Based on Alternative sources of wateR: aDvanced Integrated technologies and management). The model has been implemented in the ArcGIS environment, as a Geospatial Database for a decision support system. The GABARDINE Geospatial Database uses advantages of object-oriented modelling (UML), it follows standards for geoscientific information exchange (ISO/TC211 and OGC), and it is compliant with the recommendations from the European Geospatial Information Working Group. Finally, these two developed models have been tested with hydrogeological field data on different informatics platforms: from MS Access, through a proprietary ArcGIS environment, to the open source, free Web2GIS on-line application. They have also contributed to the development of the GroundWater Markup Language (GWML) Canadian exchange standard, compliant with Geographic Markup Language (GML). GWML has the potential of becoming an international HydroGeology Markup Language (HgML) standard with a strong and continuous support from the hydrogeological community.

A indústria de desenvolvimento de software está em constante evolução e em busca de novos desafios, como por exemplo: novas tecnologias, linguagens de programação e estratégias para aumentar a produtividade no desenvolvimento. Com o passar do tempo, essa evolução desejada tem se concretizado, em especial com o surgimento de conceitos como Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) e Model-Driven Development (MDD). Nesse contexto, ganha importância a reutilização de software, por exemplo por meio do uso de serviços que facilitam a interoperabilidade entre diferentes sistemas. Ambientes de desenvolvimento de software, em especial ambientes de reúso de software, poderiam se adequar à arquitetura SOA para facilitar a disponibilização de serviços a outros ambientes, promovendo sua integração e aumentando a possibilidade de reúso. Após um levantamento bibliográfico sobre ambientes integrados de reúso que utilizassem serviços para permitir o compartilhamento de recursos, percebeu-se que os trabalhos nessa direção são poucos. Ao mesmo tempo, observou-se que para integração de sistemas por meio de serviços é necessário criar camadas de acesso às entidades dos sistemas que compartilharão informações. A implementação desses serviços de forma manual é repetitiva e sujeita a erros, principalmente por programadores que não estão familiarizados com SOA. Por outro lado, diagramas de classes em UML (Unified Modeling Language) são de amplo conhecimento por parte de desenvolvedores e estão em um nível de abstração que é suficientemente detalhado para permitir a derivação de serviços de acesso às suas classes. Desta forma, para atender uma demanda crescente de sistemas que precisam oferecer serviços para possibilitar sua integração com outros sistemas, este mestrado tem por objetivo promover a geração automatizada de código de serviços por meio de transformações de modelo para texto, em que o modelo de entrada é um diagrama de classes derivado da UML e os serviços gerados cobrem operações básicas do tipo CRUD. O gerador resultante foi validado por meio de duas provas de conceito e mostrou-se adequado para cumprir os objetivos estabelecidos, visto que o desenvolvedor trabalha com um modelo em alto nível de abstração, não precisando conhecer os detalhes inerentes à implementação dos serviços. / The software development industry is constantly evolving and looking for challenges, such as: new technologies, programming languages and strategies to increase developers productivity. During the course of time, this required evolution has been concretized, especially with the emergency of concepts such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Model-Driven Development (MDD). In this context, software reuse gains importance, for example through the use of services that ease the interoperability of different systems. Software development environments, in special reuse environments, could be adapted to the SOA architecture to ease the availability of services to other environments, thus promoting its integration and possibility of reuse. After a literature review about integrated reuse environments that use services to allow resources sharing, it has been observed that there are only a few works in this direction. At the same time, it was observed that for system integration through services it is required to create an access layer for the system entities that share information. The manual implementation of these services is repetitive and error prone, especially for programmers who are not familiar with SOA. On the other hand, UML (Unified Modeling Language) class diagrams are widely known by developers and are at a level of abstraction that is sufficiently detailed to allow the derivation of access services to their classes. Thus, to meet a growing demand for systems that need to provide services to enable its integration with other systems, this masters dissertation aims to promote the automated generation of service code through transformations from model to text, where the input model is a class diagram derived from UML, and the generated services cover the basic CRUD operations. The resulting generator has been validated through two proofs of concepts and was adequate to meet the stated objectives, as the developer works with a model in a high abstraction level, and does not need to know the details related with the service implementation.

The goal of this thesis is to develop an easily modifiable sensor system. To achieve this goal SensorML (an XML based sensor language) is combined with Java Beans (a component model language). An important part of SensorML is its process model. Each sensor in the real world is depicted in SensorML by a process model, whereas the connections between the sensors are shown by a process chain. This thesis presents a translator that reads these documents and converts them to Java Beans. Through testing the Translator is proved more efficient than the convenient Object Oriented approach. / UOIT

As a result of Internet popularly, the World Wide Web, a killer application which improves the global network, is used much more frequently. Because World Wide Web is browsed through GUI (Graphic User Interface) which allows end-user to interact and operate with internet websites easily, more and more websites are created and operating. For this moment, the web based GUI proved its advantages that it can be applied not only to general website but also to electronic commerce, enterprise information system, and system resources administration. Today, the processing architecture evolves from early centralized processing architecture to recently distributed processing architecture which is composed of several servers and in which each server is responsible for a different system service. But because each system platform runs on its own unique operating system, system administrators have difficulties operating it. Due to increased numbers of servers, a well-defined systematic management architecture and remote management is necessary. This thesis contains the designs of web based system administration architecture through the designs of united library interface to increase the convenience of expansion on library. In this paper, a prototype system created during the research development will serve as theory verification and as an example for developers of future system management platforms.

Today, modeling the software with unified modeling language (UML), model driven architecture (MDA) concept, and computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool are the main trend for the objected-oriented systems analysis and design. Furthermore, to enhance the degree of transformation automation and design reuse in the system development process, object constraint language (OCL) is used in UML modeling to specify the navigation, constraint, operation specification, and so forth. However, the guideline for using OCL in class diagram specification and its transformation to JAVA code is lacking. This research presents an approach utilizing the OCL to specify the constraint and operation specification for the class diagram when modeling the platform independent model (PIM), which can then be transformed into the JAVA platform specific model (PSM) and code using a CASE tool. A real-world case using the integrated techniques is presented and a CASE tool is used to illustrate the concepts, application, and the advantages of using the proposed approach. With this approach, the system developer can transform PIM into PSM and code automatically and thereby enhance the efficiency of system development.

This study presents a systematic methodology which integrated the model driven architecture with object-oriented technique to transform the user interface (UI) platform independent model (PIM) into Web-based UI platform specific model (PSM), and then into code model. A real-world case using the integrated techniques is presented and the Rational Rose is used to illustrate the concepts, application, and the advantages of using the proposed methodology. With this approach, the system developer can transform UI PIM into Web-based UI PSM and code automatically and thereby enhance the efficiency of system development.

Today, unified modeling language (UML) has become a standard modeling language in object-oriented systems analysis and design. Over the past few years a considerable effort has been made in synthesizing UML, MDA (model driven architecture), design patterns and CASE tool to increase the productivity of the system development. Specifying the design patterns with object constraint language (OCL) has become a main trend in this area. This study classifies the OCL expressions and design patterns and presents a method to specify each design pattern with the OCL and UML when modeling the platform independent model which can then be transformed into the platform dependent model, and to a code model. A real-world case using the integrated techniques is presented and a CASE tool is used to illustrate the concepts, application, and the advantages of using the proposed approach. With this approach, the system developer can transform PIM into code automatically and thereby enhance the efficiency and reusability of system development.