Preserving Use Case Flows in Source Code

In this paper an approach to preserving use case flows of events in source code called InFlow is proposed. The approach preserves individual steps of use case flows of events in the form of their counterpart statements, as well as their ordering. This is achieved by mimicking each flow of events by a sequence of method implementations with each step of the flow of events corresponding to one statement in one of these methods, enabled by a metaprogramming mechanism based around the annotation named InFlow, first implemented in Python. The approach is not limited to Python and actually has been implemented in Ruby, AspectJ, and PHP, too. We evaluated the InFlow approach by conducting a study of the audio streaming service. The overall results indicate that the InFlow approach is better at preserving use case flows of events in source code than DCI and aspect-oriented software development with use cases. Having use case steps directly visible in code makes the intent expressed by the code more comprehensible and easier to maintain.