Deriving executable process descriptions from UML

• Published in: Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 155 - 165
• Main Authors: Nitto, Elisabetta Di, Lavazza, Luigi, Schiavoni, Marco, Tracanella, Emma, Trombetta, Michele
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 2002
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer science; control theory; systems; Exact sciences and technology; Software; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software development process management; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > General programming languages > Language features > Procedures, functions and subroutines; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > General programming languages > Language types; Software engineering; Formal language; Unified modelling language; Semantics; Software engineering
• ISBN: 158113472X; 9781581134728
• ISSN: 0270-5257
• DOI: 10.1145/581339.581361

In the recent past, a relevant effort has been devoted to the definition of process modeling languages (PMLs). The resulting languages and environments -although technically successful-did not receive much attention from industry. On the contrary, researchers and practitioners have recently started experimenting with the usage of UML as a PML. Being so popular and widely used, UML has an important competitive advantage compared to any specialized PML. However, it has also a main limitation. While most PMLs are executable by some process engine, UML was conceived as a non-executable, semi-formal language. The work described here aims at assessing the possibility of employing a subset of UML as an executable PML. The article proposes a formalization of the semantics of the UML subset and presents the translation of UML process models into code, which can be enacted in the OPSS process-centered environment. The paper also presents a case study to validate the approach. We expect that process modeling by means of UML is easier and available to a larger community of software process managers. Moreover, process enactment makes the process more efficient, reliable, predictable and controllable, as widely shown by previous research.