This thesis investigates the building of a textual tracing language that operates at the model level to allow trace specification of textually modeled UML constructs. Current tracing approaches focus on manually injecting tracepoints into targeted systems at the source code level. Such approaches are useful in code-centric development styles where the majority of the code is handwritten. However, in the case of Model Driven Development (MDD), where models are utilized to generate some or all of the code, current tracing technology results in low level trace specification and generation of execution traces that are not aware of or linked to the originating model-level constructs. Dynamic analysis hence becomes harder for a modeler adopting an MDD approach. This field, which we call model-oriented tracing, is currently immature, with little pre-existing research.
In this thesis, we present a textual model-level tracing language, implemented as part of Umple, that overcomes some of the limitations of existing tracing methods. The language facilitates model-level tracing, in a fashion very similar to code tracing. The language, which we call MOTL (Model-Oriented Tracing Language) allows tracing of UML associations, attributes and state machines. Constraints can be imposed to limit the scope of tracing.
As a result of this work, modelers will gain the ability to specify traces of UML constructs at the model level without the need to modify the generated code, and then generate execution traces when the generated system is run. The resulting trace links back to the model constructs. Modelers can choose from among several tracing technologies including basic file or console output, Java logging framework, Log4J and LTTng.
This thesis defines the language syntactically and semantically. Model-Driven Development (MDD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD) were followed to implement the language architecture to ensure high quality code generation. MOTL was used in the development in two of Umple subprojects. An empirical evaluation was conducted to evaluate the language’s usability.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/33419 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Aljamaan, Hamoud |
| Contributors | Lethbridge, Timothy |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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