Integrating UML with Service Refinement for Requirements Modeling and Analysis

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the de facto standard for requirements modeling and system design. UML as a visual language can tremendously help customers, project managers, and developers to specify the requirements of a target system. However, UML lacks the ability to specify the requirements precisely such as the contracts of the system operation, and verify the consistency and refinement of the requirements. These disadvantages result in that the potential faults of software are hard to be discovered in the early stage of software development process, and then requiring more efforts in software testing to find the bugs. Service refinement is a formal method, which could be a supplement to enhance the UML. In this paper, we show how to integrate UML with service refinement to specify requirements, and verify the consistency and refinements of the requirements through a case study of online shopping system. Particularly, requirements are modeled through UML diagrams, which includes a) use case diagram, b) system sequence diagrams and c) conceptual class diagram. Service refinement enhances the requirements model by introducing the contracts. Furthermore, the consistency and refinements of requirement model can be verified through service refinement. Our approach demonstrates integrating UML with service refinement can require fewer efforts to achieve the consistency requirements than only using UML for requirement modeling.