Generating structured implementation schemes from UML sequence diagrams

In the Unified Modeling Language (UML), a use case describes a particular functionality a system can perform by interacting with outside actors. A realization of a use case can be given as a set of sequence diagrams. The paper discusses how to generate structured implementation schemes represented as pseudocode from a set of sequence diagrams in UML. The proposed approach can be applied to any set of sequence diagrams, allowing the user to view the implementations of operation bodies as implied by this set of sequence diagrams, and to merge the different views into a single implementation scheme that can be used as a starting point for the actual implementation. We show how these techniques can be exploited in a UML-based CASE environment by augmenting an automatically generated class diagram with UML notes describing implementation schemes for individual operations. The described techniques have been implemented in a real CASE environment.