An Approach of Conformance Verification between Design Models and Code Based on Abstract Syntax Tree

Abstract

Design models and code are products of different stages in the software development process. The conformance of design models and code plays an important role in software development process, also is a key principle to improve the maintainability of the software. Currently, the conformance on different level of abstraction is verified mostly by manual inspection. In order to avoid the errors and omissions, we propose a conformance verification approach between design models and code based on abstract syntax tree. The approach verifies the conformance by comparing the class diagram, sequence diagram with the code. Firstly, we discuss how to extract and recover model information from the abstract syntax tree, then give the conformance verification approach between class diagram, sequence diagram and code, finally implement a semi-automatic verification tool based on the approach.