The cost of maintaining the same
information in two places, code and models, is high because it is a manual process,
tedious, and error prone.
Models can also be used in reverse engineering: trying to understand the
software after it is designed and built. While creating model-based documentation
afterwards is understandable, code visualization can also be useful when trying to
understand what a program does or importing libraries or other constructs from
code to be used as elements in models. Such models, however, are typically not used
for implementing, debugging, or testing the software as we have the code.
Round-tripping aims to automate the work of keeping the same information
up-to-date in two places, models and code. Round-tripping works only when the
formats are very similar and there is no loss of information between the translations.
In software development, this is true in relatively few areas and typically only for
the structural speci?¬?cations. For instance, a model of a schema can be created from
a database and a database schema can be generated from a model. Round-tripping
with program code is more problematic since modeling languages don??™t cover the
details of programming languages and vice versa. Usually the class skeletons can be
shown in models but the rest??”behavior, interaction, and dynamics??”are not
covered in the round-trip process and they stay in the code.
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