Consistency checking between use case scenarios and UML sequence diagrams

In software engineering projects consistency checking is both essential and expensive. Over the course of a software project, requirements often change, resulting in changes to design artifacts. The task of maintaining consistency between requirements and design is a difficult and time consuming task. Provided it is possible to provide consistency rules and a mapping between requirements artifacts and design artifacts, it is possible to automate the task of maintaining consistency between the two. Automation can take one of two forms: mapping and consistency rules are used to auto-generate sections of the UML design. For example if a message passing sequence is used to implement a scenario step then the same set of message passing should occur in every sequence diagram which maps to a scenario containing that step. Secondly a series of consistency checks can be conducted and the results reported. This paper describes a proof of concept software tool, known as EnsureUML, which can be used to perform consistency checks. EnsureUML proves that it is possible to run a series of checks over use case scenario texts and their corresponding UML sequence diagrams to highlight inconsistencies within the scenarios and diagrams, and between corresponding scenario / diagram pairs.