4.7 The View 'Rule Checker'

• incomplete design such as unnamed classes, states without transitions,
• incorrect design such as an interface having an association with navigability away from the interface,
• style issues such as circular dependencies among packages, a class referencing one of its subclasses,
• violation of naming conventions for classes, attributes, operations, packages,
• etc.

The 'Rule Checker' view displays design rule violations in a table. Each row of the table represents a violation of a design rule by a design element.

Figure 12: Design Rule Checker

The meaning of the columns is as follows:

• Name: Name of the design element that violates the rule.
• Rule: Name of the violated rule.
• Value: Some rules return a value that provides additional information about how the design element violates the rule.
• Category: The category of the rule describes the criteria the rule checks, for example naming, completeness, correctness, or style.
• Severity: The severity of the violated indicates how critical the violation of the rule is, and therefore how urgently it should be resolved.
• Description: A short description of the violated rule.

Sort the table of design rule violations by columns, e.g., to quickly find all rule violations for a particular design element, all violations of a particular rule, or to sort the rule violations by their severity or category. Section 4.3.1 "Common controls in views" describes how to sort tables.