Structural similarity measure between UML class diagrams based on UCG

• Published in: Requirements engineering Vol. 25; no. 2; pp. 213 - 229
• Main Authors: Yuan, Zhongchen, Yan, Li, Ma, Zongmin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Springer London 01.06.2020; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Computer Science; Domains; Original Article; Semantics; Similarity; Similarity measures; Software Engineering; Software reuse; UCG; Inter-structure; Intra-structure; UML class diagram; Software reuse; Structural similarity
• ISSN: 0947-3602; 1432-010X
• DOI: 10.1007/s00766-019-00317-w

In software reuse, the reuse of UML class diagram produced in design phase has received more attention due to the important influence on the following developing process. The reuse is based on similarity. The similarity between class diagrams contains semantic and structural aspects. The existing works focus on semantic similarity, while the structural similarity is little paid attention to. The structure of class diagram can be categorized into two aspects: intra - structure and inter - structure . The intra-structure refers to the composition of each class, and the inter-structure is represented as the relationships between classes. So, the structural similarity measure should be carried out from these two aspects. In this paper, we propose to use a graph named UML class graph (UCG) to represent a class diagram for the structural similarity measure. An algorithm based on UCG Maximum Common Subgraph Sequence is proposed for the inter-structure similarity measure, and UCG edit distance is proposed and introduced to the intra-structure similarity measure. The experimental results show that our proposed approach is effective within a domain or across domains.