Round-Trip Engineering

This paper has been concerned with systems design using UML but it would not be complete without a short description concerning round-trip engineering. The use of UML can greatly simplify system analysis and design. It can provide all of the documentation needed to actually go build a system. Using modern CASE tools, one can actually generate code straight from the model. A model can be built and then using forward engineering, generate the initial set of code ready for implementation. The code will contain all of the class declarations and stub code for the implementation. Class associations will also be generated. Round-trip engineering allows a developer to update the code and then refresh the model to match the code. Working in this manner can yield high results for a developer. The benefit to a developer is faster code development because the models contains all of the constructs and can generate much of the stub code needed. The benefit to the organization is that the model is always fresh and describes exactly the product being built.