Michel Chaudron 

Affiliation: LIACS, Leiden University

Leiden, The Netherlands

Tel: +31-71-527-7065

E-mail: chaudron@liacs.nl

Quality Assurance for UML Modeling

Modeling has become common practice in modern day software engineering. Since the mid 1990?s the Unified Modeling Language (UML) has become the de facto standard for modeling software systems. The UML is used in all phases of software development: ranging from the requirements phase to the maintenance phase. However, the use of UML varies widely from project to project and from developer to developer. Whereas a body of practices has emerged for assuring quality of source code, no such body has emerged for managing the quality of UML models. This paper reports on the insights obtained in our journey towards industrial strength methods for quality assurance for software modeling. Additionally, we provide recommendations for practitioners for assuring quality of UML modeling in industrial software development.

Short Bio

Chaudron studied Computer Science in Leiden, Netherlands (1987-1992, M.Sc. and Ph.D. 1992-1997). He performed part of his M. Sc. studies at the Programming Research Lab at Oxford University under supervision of Prof. C.A.R. Hoare and part of his Ph.D. studies at Imperial College in London (host: Prof. C. Hankin). Chaudron he worked for two years with IT-company CMG. There he worked as an architect in the area of traffic and transport telematics. Amongst others he was involved in projects in Electronic Toll Collection Systems, Smart-card systems for e-payment and access control. He returned to academia in 1999 to become assistant professor at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherland (TUE). Since 2006 Chaudron is associate professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science. In many of his research projects there is close collaborations with industry (o.a. Philips, Nokia, Fagor, Ikerlan, Oce, ASML and several IT companies). Through these projects Chaudron aims to develop scientifically sound methods for supporting the making of design-trade-offs in the architecting of complex IT systems. His research is often empirical in nature. His current topics of interest are: automated optimization of software architecture design, teaching and testing software design skills, updating UML models, and automated reasoning about software designs.