A software development process based on UML state machines

Overview & Synopsis

We propose a model-based software development process based on UML state machines. State machines are executable models and such models offer the advantage to capture the behavior of a system at a high-level of abstraction. Besides, the business parts of the system can be specified and weave onto the executable models, applying a good separation of concerns. While advanced standards such as fUML enable to define the complete contents of an application at the model level, it leads to too much complexity and prevents flexibility in the use of existing code. For these reasons, we propose an intermediate and pragmatic approach where a UML state machine is compiled onto Java code for our lightweight execution engine PauWare. The business parts of the application are then implemented in standard Java.