Identifying design-code inconsistencies in object-oriented software: a case study

Abstract

Traceability is a key issue to ensure consistency among software artifacts of subsequent phases of the development cycle. However few works have addressed the theme of tracing object oriented design into its software. This paper presents an approach to check the compliance of OO design with respect to source code. The process works on design artefacts expressed in OMT notation and accepts C++ source code. It recovers an "as is" design from the code, compares recovered design with the actual design and helps the user to deal with inconsistency by pointing out regions of code which do not match with design. The recovery process exploits regular expression and edit distance to bridge the gap between code and design. Results as well as consideration related to presentation issues are reported in the paper.