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Umplification - An Introduction

Umplification involves transforming step by step a base language program to an Umple program; each step is a refactoring. The starting point and the ending point of each transformation will be a system rendered in a textual form combining model elements in the Umple syntax and base language code.

Umplification involves increasing the proportion of modeling elements.

The key insight is that a pure Java program can be seen as a special case of an Umple program. A pure model can also be seen as such a special case. So Umplification involves repeatedly modifying the Umple to add abstractions, while maintaining the semantics of the program, and also maintaining to the greatest extent possible such elements as layout, algorithmic methods and comments.

Two main features differentiate Umple from existing reverse engineering techniques.

1. The Tranformations required are intended to be applied incrementally by a programmer who has a body of legacy code and wants to gradually transform it into Umple, preserving much of the layout, comments and other aspects of the original code if possible.
2. The transformations required are at the same time code-to-model,model-to-model and code-to-code.