Dependence analysis for UML class diagrams

Though Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been widely used in software development, the major problems confronted lie in comprehension and testing. Dependence analysis is an important approach to analyze, understand, test and maintain programs. A new kind of dependence analysis method for UML class diagrams is developed. A set of dependence relations is defined corresponding to the relations among classes. Thus, the dependence graph of UML class diagram can be constructed from these dependence relations. Based on this model, both slicing and measurement coupling are further given as its two applications.