Executing State Machine

[malmoth]

A great feature missing in EA is the ability to run state machine in order to check the model consistency. This function should provide executed sequence diagrams to be compared with the specified sequence diagrams.
This function is particularly useful for system modeling.

[«Midnight»]

While this is a (very) big feature to take on all at once, surely there are some first steps in this direction that would provide some tangible benefit.

Anyone have ideas how this can be broken down into managable chunks?

[malmoth]

A first step could be to ckeck the state machine itself. No dead-end/unreachable state.
Even this is a big piece to deal with. UML defines many types of transitions, with or without guards.

[«Midnight»]

I wonder if we could do this now, via some model validation rules.

I've been meaning to (read: putting off) experiment with this a bit. Don't know if I'lll get a moment soon (my client has just bought all my evenings and weekends for a while) but you might want to look.

Even if the EA validation facility won't cover this now, in the short term Sparx may be in a better position to enhance this function than add a major new feature.

In the longer term it is unlikely that simple validation rules will get anywhere near what we can do by exercising a state machine, but it is a start.