Flexible views for view-based model-driven development

Abstract

Modern software development faces growing size and complexity of the systems that are being developed. To cope with this complexity, several languages and modelling formalisms are used during the development of a system in order to describe it from various view points and at multiple levels of abstraction. These languages and modeling formalisms are specific to the domain of the system under development, to the paradigms that are followed, and to the developer tools being used. For example, in a component-based process, the software architecture may be defined using a component metamodel, while class diagrams are used for the object-oriented design of the system; performance and reliability models express the extra-functional properties; program code in a general-purpose programming language defines the execution semantics, and is used for the implementation of the system. Although all these artefacts follow different concepts and formalisms, they express the same system from various view points and can thus be understood as views on the system under development. The entirety of these views can be identified as a complete definition of the system. Although the usage of multiple formalisms offers the advantage that different developers can describe the system from different view points, and in languages and models that are specially designed for this purpose, it introduces the problem of fragmentation of information across heterogeneous artefacts in different formats, concepts, and languages. With increasing complexity of the systems, this makes navigation through the system description difficult for developers and other roles in the development process. Furthermore, since the concepts and formalisms are managed independently, they can share semantic overlaps, so that a piece of information about the system under i Abstract development can be expressed in several ways and contexts. For example, while a component model may be used to express the prescriptive software architecture of a system, the implementation in a general-purpose programming language also determines an implicit architecture of the system, which leads to redundancies in the system descriptions. The independent evolution of these artefacts can lead to inconsistencies, which cannot be identified automatically if the semantic correspondances between the artefacts are not modelled explicitly.View-based software development processes offer two fundamental principles of adressing this problem: While synthetic approaches integrate the information of heterogeneous models to form a complete system description, projective approaches introduce a common formalism in which all view points of the system can be represented, and generate the views from this central model. While the pure synthetic approach suffers from a quadratic increase of interdependencies between the view types, which become very numerous with a growing number of formalisms that have to be supported, the projective approach faces the problem of providing a common formalism that is ab...

View-centric engineering with synchronized heterogeneous models

“…1 shows the relation between view type, view, and view point. We use the definitions for these concepts that are given in [5]:…”

“…The Flexible views [5] concept offers the rapid definition of custom, user-specific views for view-based development. A flexible view and the view type it conforms to are generated from a view specification in a light-weight Domain-Specific Language (DSL).…”

Flexible views for rapid model-driven development

“…In view-centric modeling approaches, all access to these models is organised in views. We will use the definition of the terms view, view type and view point from previous work [14,6], which is slightly different from the the IEEE 1471/ISO 42010 standard [15,16]. Definition 1.…”

“…It is, however, difficult to create views that span multiple metamodels; in the definition of [14], a view type is even adjacent to only a single metamodel. In the Vitruvius approach, flexible views [6] are used for the the rapid construction of custom, user-specific views, which aggregate information from heterogeneous models.…”

“…In this paper, we present the usage of flexible views [6] for rapid Model-Driven Development in the context of the novel view-based modeling approach Vitruvius, which is based on Orthographic Software Modeling (OSM) by Atkinson et al [2]. Vitruvius enables the software developer to focus on the parts of the system which are relevant for his or her current role by offering view types that aggregate information from heterogenous models.…”