Systematic Diagram Refinement for Code Generation in SEAM

Model-driven development (MDD) is methodology of software construction emerging recently to counter the drawbacks of classic approaches. Apart from the well-known UML, SEAM is another MDD approach increasingly attracting attention due to its capability of regarding the whole system as a single view, thus enabling consistency maintaining during the design development. Especially, the final diagram designed in SEAM can support automatic code generation, which has been the desirable goal of software engineering. However, SEAM suffers from the disadvantage of being too complicated when the system is designed in details at last steps. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose an approach of systematic diagram refinement which allows users to specify transition matrices in each refinement steps, instead a whole new diagrams. Thus, the diagram developments will become less complicated and more natural. We also illustrate the usefulness of our approach in a featured case-study.