Meta-Environments for Software Production

Abstract

Researchers who create software production environments face considerable problems. Software production environments are large systems that are very costly to develop. Furthermore, software production environments which support particular software engineering methods may not be applicable to a large number of software production projects. These conditions have formed a trend towards research into ways which will lessen the cost of developing software production environments. In particular, the trend has been towards the construction of meta-environments. In this paper, we attempt to categorize current meta-environment approaches. For each of the categories, we review research efforts which illustrate different approaches within that category. We conclude by presenting an emerging common thread of requirements which links this field together.

The SMART approach for software process engineering

“…In this manner, SMART illustrates the capabilities of a meta-environment [14] , i.e., an environment for the generation of an environment. The model transformer needs to convert the various abstract representations, i.e., process model classes, to actual instances of environment components.…”

“…In this regard, SMART is a metaenvironment that accepts a process model as its input specification, then generates a process program which produces an executable PSEE [14]. However, since there is additional information available in the process program representation regarding activities, this step cannot be fully automated in all cases.…”