UMLDS: A Round-Trip Engineering Support Tool to Avoid Unintended Design Changes

In round-trip engineering projects such as agile development methods, it isn’t easy to maintain consistency among artifacts. One way to maintain consistency among artifacts in software development projects is to use traceability links. However, few studies have proposed traceability links from source code to UML. In round-trip engineering, the developer may make changes to the source code and apply those changes to the UML. We evaluated a method for designers to avoid unintended design changes due to changes in source code. We showed in our experiments that our method has particular effectiveness. The content of this paper is an additional experiment, an evaluation of the items that designers consider important in their decision to accept changes to the design document.