Seamlessness, reversibility, and software contracting have been proposed as important, if not essential, techniques to be supported by object-oriented modeling languages and methods. These techniques are used to provide a framework for the comparison of two modeling languages, the Business Object Notation (BON)--which has been designed to support the techniques--and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Elements of the UML and its constraint language, OCL, that do not support these techniques are discussed. Suggestions for further improvements to both BON and UML are described.

(A shorter and modified version of this paper appears in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on UML (UML'99), LNCS 1723, p67-82, Springer-Verlag, October 1999.)

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