Alyami Abdulrahman, Pileggi Salvatore Flavio, Sohaib Osama, Hawryszkiewycz Igor
Department of Information Systems, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Jouf University, Sakaka, Saudi Arabia.
School of Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
PeerJ Comput Sci. 2023 Jun 22;9:e1444. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1444. eCollection 2023.
System design is an essential subject taught in information systems and has become a core course in its curriculum. Unified modelling language (UML) has been broadly adopted, and it is common to support the system design process using different diagrams. Each diagram serves a purpose by focusing on a specific part of a particular system. Design consistency ensures a seamless process, as the diagrams are generally interrelated. However, creating a well-designed system takes a lot of work, especially for university students with work experience. To overcome this challenge, aligning the concepts across diagrams is essential, which can help achieve better consistency and management of the design system, especially in an educational setting. This article is an extension of our previous work, as we have discussed a simple scenario of Automated teller machines to demonstrate the alignment concepts between UML diagrams. From a more technical perspective, the current contribution provides a Java program that aligns concepts by converting text-based use cases to text-based sequence diagrams. Then, the text is transformed in PlantUML to generate its graphical representation. The developed alignment tool is expected to contribute to helping students and instructors during the system design phases to be more consistent and practical. Limitations and future work are presented.
系统设计是信息系统专业中一门重要的课程，并且已成为该专业课程体系中的核心课程。统一建模语言（UML）已被广泛采用，使用不同的图来支持系统设计过程是很常见的。每个图都通过关注特定系统的特定部分来发挥作用。设计一致性确保了流程的无缝衔接，因为这些图通常是相互关联的。然而，创建一个设计良好的系统需要大量工作，尤其是对于有工作经验的大学生来说。为了克服这一挑战，使各个图之间的概念保持一致至关重要，这有助于在设计系统时实现更好的一致性和管理，特别是在教育环境中。本文是我们之前工作的扩展，因为我们曾讨论过自动取款机的一个简单场景，以展示UML图之间的一致性概念。从更技术的角度来看，当前的贡献提供了一个Java程序，该程序通过将基于文本的用例转换为基于文本的序列图来使概念保持一致。然后，文本在PlantUML中进行转换以生成其图形表示。预计所开发的一致性工具将有助于在系统设计阶段帮助学生和教师更加一致和实际地开展工作。文中还介绍了局限性和未来的工作。
