Vers l'utilisation d'outils de validation de pro- tocoles dans UML

Despite a growing interest in formal methods and related validation and verification tools, the development of distributed systems does not often rely on them. We claim this is mainly due to formal methods lack of support for modern software life cycles. The construction and maintenance of open distributed systems are more and more based on object-oriented software development. We investigate how frameworks may help to embed formal validation techniques in an object-oriented process based on the use of the UML notation. We illustrate our approach with the Alternating Bit Protocol, and we show how it meets the goal of an iterative and continuous validation during the whole software life cycle.