| With the complexity of software systems increasing at a rapid rate, the parties involved in the analysis, design, and the implementation of such systems need a better approach to handle their increased complexity. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides the solution. It is a general purpose visual modeling language that is used to specify, visualize, construct, and document the artifacts of a software system. Moreover, recent developments take this one step further and are capable to create executable programs from UML diagrams. However, one impediment in the widespread use of UML is the lack of tools that provide a more intuitive creation and modification of UML diagrams. For example, during meetings between different stakeholders, UML diagrams are drawn on whiteboards and then discussed and modified. Unfortunately, many diagrams or changes to the existing diagrams are not implemented in the software versions and important design decisions, externalized in temporary drawings, are lost. This makes documenting and later troubleshooting more cumbersome. A Tidy Touchscreen Interface to a UML Development Environment (ATTITUDE) proposed in this thesis is intended to fill this gap by allowing the creation and modification of UML diagrams using a touch screen interface. With it, the UML diagrams can be easily and intuitively created and/or modified allowing all parties to have the updated requirements set forth in the UML diagrams. Thus, instead of drawing the UML diagrams on the whiteboards during their discussion and modification, the users can modify them by using a touch screen (and maybe a projector, if the audience involved is large) and save them, instead of erasing them off the board at the end of the meeting. This thesis presents a background survey of current touch screen devices, provides an overview of several software tools for UML-based design, and details the software model and prototype implementation of the proposed ATTITUDE tool. A discussion of the capabilities of the tool and a set of directions for future work are also presented in the thesis. |
