Agile MERODE: a model-driven software engineering method for user-centric and value-based development

Agile is often associated with a lack of architectural thinking causing technical debt but has the advantage of user centricity and a strong focus on value. Model-driven software engineering (MDSE) strongly performs for building a quality architecture and code, but lacks focus on user requirements and tends to consider development as a monolithic whole. The combination of Agile and MDSE has been explored, but a convincing integrated method has not been proposed yet. This paper addresses this gap by exploring the specific combination of MERODE—as an example of a proven MDSE method—with Scrum, a reference agile method offering a concrete (sprint-based) life cycle management on the basis of user stories. The method resulting of this integration is called Agile MERODE; it is driven by user stories, themselves associated with behavior-driven development scenarios. It allows for domain-driven design and permits fast development from domain models by means of code generation. An illustrative example further clarifies the practical application of Agile MERODE, while a case study shows the planning game application in the case’s context. While the approach, in its entirety, allows reducing technical debt by building the architecture in a logical, consistent and complete manner, introducing MDSE involves a trade-off with pure value-driven development. Agile MERODE contributes to the state of the art by showing how to increase user centricity in MDSE, how to align model-driven engineering with the Scrum cycle, and how to reduce the technical debt of agile developments yet remaining value-focused.

     

Instrumenting scenarios in a model-driven development environment

SpecExplorer is an integrated environment for model-driven development of .NET software. In this paper we discuss how scenarios can be described in SpecExplorer's modeling language, Spec#, and how the SpecExplorer tool can be used to validate those scenarios by various means.     

View-based model-driven software development with ModelJoin

Fragmentation of information across instances of different metamodels poses a significant problem for software developers and leads to a major increase in effort of transformation development. Moreover, compositions of metamodels tend to be incomplete, imprecise, and erroneous, making it impossible to present it to users or use it directly as input for applications. Customized views satisfy information needs by focusing on a particular concern, and filtering out information that is not relevant to this concern. For a broad establishment of view-based approaches, an automated solution to deal with separate metamodels and the high complexity of model transformations is necessary. In this paper, we present the ModelJoin approach for the rapid creation of views. Using a human-readable textual DSL, developers can define custom views declaratively without having to write model transformations or define a bridging metamodel. Instead, a metamodel generator and higher-order transformations create annotated target metamodels and the appropriate transformations on-the-fly. The resulting views, which are based on these metamodels, contain joined instances and can effectively express concerns unforseen during metamodel design. We have applied the ModelJoin approach and validated the textual DSL in a case study using the Palladio Component Model.     

rCOS: a formal model-driven engineering method for component-based software

Model-driven architecture (MDA) has become a main stream technology for software-intensive system design. The main engineering principle behind it is that the inherent complexity of software development can only be mastered by building, analyzing and manipulating system models. MDA also deals with system complexity by providing component-based design techniques, allowing independent component design, implementation and deployment, and then system integration and reconfiguration based on component interfaces. The model of a system in any stage is an integration of models of different viewpoints. Therefore, for a model-driven method to be applied effectively, it must provide a body of techniques and an integrated suite of tools for model construction, validation, and transformation. This requires a number of modeling notations for the specification of different concerns and viewpoints of the system. These notations should have formally defined syntaxes and a unified theory of semantics. The underlying theory of the method is needed to underpin the development of tools and correct use of tools in software development, as well as to formally verify and reason about properties of systems in mission-critical applications. The modeling notations, techniques, and tools must be designed so that they can be used seamlessly in supporting development activities and documentation of artifacts in software design processes. This article presents such a method, called the rCOS, focusing on the models of a system at different stages in a software development process, their semantic integration, and how they are constructed, analyzed, transformed, validated, and verified.     

Mining software repositories for model-driven development

One major reason software development projects fail is that the development process is invisible. Managers tend to rely on meetings and reports to understand project status and make decisions, leading to mismanagement due to inaccurate or incomplete information. Software projects typically collect information during development using different tools and store it in repositories. We present a statistical process control (SPC) method of defining, collecting, and analyzing software metrics from software repositories for MDD process control and improvement (PCI). This method, which we call mining software repositories (MSR), can help us change the traditional, static, record-keeping use of software data repositories to a new, active use for predicting and planning various aspects of MDD projects.     

Language support for model-driven software development

This paper is about language technology for facilitating model-driven software development. We argue that two features are important for this purpose: (a) support for explicit meta-representation of programs as an AST-like structure (AST stands for abstract syntax tree) accessible in a programmatic way before and beyond the compilation, and (b) support for user-defined annotations of program elements. That is, we argue for language platforms organized around a Generalized Annotated AST, or GAAST languages for short. We outline the problems with a model-driven development process based on languages without such a support and show how GAAST language technology addresses these problems.     

Building ubiquitous QoC-aware applications through model-driven software engineering

As every-day mobile devices can easily be equipped with multiple sensing capabilities, ubiquitous applications are expected to exploit the richness of the context information that can be collected by these devices in order to provide the service that is the most appropriate to the situation of the user. However, the design and implementation of such context-aware ubiquitous appplications remain challenging as there exist very few models and tools to guide application designers and developers in mastering the complexity of context information. This becomes even more crucial as context is by nature imperfect. One way to address this issue is to associate to context information meta-data representing its quality. We propose a generic and extensible design process for context-aware applications taking into account the quality of context (QoC). We demonstrate its use on a prototype application for sending flash sale offers to mobile users. We present extensive performance results in terms of memory and processing time of both elementary context management operations and the whole context policy implementing the Flash sale application. The cost of adding QoC management is also measured and appears to be limited to a few milliseconds. We show that a context policy with 120 QoC-aware nodes can be processed in less than 100 ms on a mobile phone. Moreover, a policy of almost 3000 nodes can be instantiated before exhausting the resources of the phone. This enables very rich application scenarios enhancing the user experience and will favor the development of new ubiquitous applications.     

Collaboration and coordination in process-centered software development environments: a review of the literature

Process-centered software development environments are systems that provide automated support for software development activities.Such environments mediate the efforts of potentially large groups of developers working on a common project. This mediation is based on runtime support for actual work performance based on formal representations of work.In the present work, we survey and assess the contributions of the software process literature under the perspective of support for collaboration and coordination. A broad range of alternative approaches to various aspects of representation and runtime support are identified, based on the analysis of an expressive number of systems. The identified functionality can serve both as a guide for the evaluation and selection of systems of this kind as well as a roadmap for the development of new, improved systems.     

Supporting software quality in an integrated safety-critical systems development environment

Research is described, aimed to support traceability in the design of software for safety-critical applications, through the provision of an on-line design journal enabling design decisions and actions to be traced and recorded. The design environment, within which various software design tools may be encapsulated, enables protocol between the user and the design tools to be trapped. This provides software engineering support at the conceptual design stage. An important aim of the research is to enable inferences to be made from the captured protocol, for which the application of artificial intelligence methods is being investigated.     

A model-driven software engineering workflow and tool architecture for servitised manufacturing

Modern manufacturing businesses increasingly engage in servitisation, by offering advanced services along with physical products, and creating “product–service systems”. Information Technology infrastructures, and especially software, are a critical part of modern service provision. However, software development in this context has not been investigated and there are no development methods or tools specifically adapted to the task of creating software for servitised businesses in general, or manufacturing in particular. In this paper, we define the requirements for software engineering in servitised manufacturing. Based on these, we describe a model-driven software engineering workflow for servitised manufacturing, supporting both structural and behavioural modelling of the service system. Furthermore, we elaborate on the architecture of an appropriate model-driven Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The proposed workflow and a prototype implementation of the IDE were evaluated in a set of industrial pilots, demonstrating improved communication and collaboration between participants in the software engineering process.     

Editorial to theme issue on model-driven engineering of component-based software systems

Software and Systems Modeling - This theme issue aims at providing a forum for disseminating latest trends in the use and combination of model-driven engineering (MDE) and component-based software...     

支持模型驱动开发的软构件形式化描述方法

针对模型驱动的软件开发(MDSD)中语义特性保持的描述和验证等问题,基于类型范畴理论的形式化框架和进程代数理论,提出了一种软件结构模型的形式化描述方法。在此基础上对模型转换前后构件规范之间应满足的语义约束进行了深入的分析和探讨,从图表结构、端口与配置约束、外部行为以及可替换性等四个方面对特性约束保持的问题进行了描述,并建立了相应的判定标准。该方法能为模型之间转换规则的定义提供指导,并为模型转换的效果分析和正确性验证提供依据。应用研究表明,该方法使得构件模型的语义描述能力显著增强,可作为已有软件建模方法的一个有效补充。     

A complete software engineering environment

A complete software engineering environment is comprised of all the engineering tasks for developing, reengineering, and maintaining software systems. These tasks can be supported by automated tools, manual procedures, or both. The organizational challenge is to automate the right tasks in the correct order so that they have the greatest impact on software quality and engineer productivity. Our experience indicates that tools for managing system requirements, configurations and changes, acceptance testing, and verification and validation result in significant, measurable benefits     

Flow: A software development environment using diagrams

The multiuser software development system FLOW uses a diagrammatic language, FLOW-DL, to represent the system under development. Once a module has been keyed in, one of three post-processors is called to generate source code in Pascal, Fortran, or Cobol. A fourth post-processor generates documentation. The system also includes a syntax-directed editor, as well as a software production data base which holds the FLOW-DL source code, interface data relating to the program modules, and control information pertaining to the state of the system under development. The package is portable; a graphics terminal is not required. Versions of the production system have been used for the past 4 years to develop a number of medium-sized software systems.     

Toward a new software development environment

The Lyee methodology allows the development of a software by simply defining its requirements. More precisely, a developer has only to provide words, calculation formulae, calculation conditions and layout of screens and printouts, and then leaves in the hands of the computer all subsequent troublesome programming process, i.e. control logic aspects. The formalization of Lyee methodology led to the definition of Lyee-Calculus, a formal process algebra, that easily and naturally supports the basic concepts of the Lyee methodology. Moreover, we provided an implementation of the constructs of the Lyee-Calculus in Java language in order to concretely show the efficiency of this calculus and its suitability for the Lyee methodology. In other words, this Java implementation of the Lyee-Calculus provides a means of bridging the gap between Lyee requirement specifications and their implementations.In this paper, we present a new software development environment, LyeeBuilder, that allows to automatically generate applications from specifications using a GUI interface. This software aims to give to programmers an environment that allows them to automatically generate applications from screens and word definitions.     

Supporting fine-grained generative model-driven evolution

In the standard generative Model-driven Architecture (MDA), adapting the models of an existing system requires re-generation and restarting of that system. This is due to a strong separation between the modeling environment and the runtime environment. Certain current approaches remove this separation, allowing a system to be changed smoothly when the model changes. These approaches are, however, based on interpretation of modeling information rather than on generation, as in MDA. This paper describes an architecture that supports fine-grained evolution combined with generative model-driven development. Fine-grained changes are applied in a generative model-driven way to a system that has itself been developed in this way. To achieve this, model changes must be propagated correctly toward impacted elements. The impact of a model change flows along three dimensions: implementation, data (instances), and modeled dependencies. These three dimensions are explicitly represented in an integrated modeling-runtime environment to enable traceability. This implies a fundamental rethinking of MDA.     

Domain model-driven software engineering: A method for discovery of dependency links

ContextDependency management often suffers from labor intensity and complexity in creating and maintaining the dependency relations in practice. This is even more critical in a distributed development, in which developers are geographically distributed and a wide variety of tools is used. In those settings, different interpretations of software requirements or usage of different terminologies make it challenging to predict the change impact.Objectiveis (a) to describe a method facilitating change management in geographically distributed software engineering by effective discovery and establishment of dependency links using domain models; (b) to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.MethodA domain model, providing a common reference point, is used to manage development objects and to automatically support dependency discovery. We propose to associate (annotate) development objects with the concepts from the model. These associations are used to compute dependency among development objects, and are stepwise refined to direct dependency links (i.e. enabling product traceability). To evaluate the method, we conducted a laboratory-based randomized experiment on two real cases. Six participants were using an implemented prototype and two comparable tools to perform simulated tasks.ResultsIn the paper we elaborate on the proposed method discussing its functional steps. Results from the experiment show that the method can be effectively used to assist in discovery of dependency links. Users have discovered on average fourteen percent more dependency links than by using the comparable tools.ConclusionsThe proposed method advocates the use of domain models throughout the whole development life-cycle and is apt to facilitate multi-site software engineering. The experimental study and results suggest that the method is effective in the discovery of dependencies among development objects.     

Type inference in flexible model-driven engineering using classification algorithms

Software and Systems Modeling - Flexible or bottom-up model-driven engineering (MDE) is an emerging approach to domain and systems modelling. Domain experts, who have detailed domain knowledge,...     

A survey of traceability in requirements engineering and model-driven development

Traceability—the ability to follow the life of software artifacts—is a topic of great interest to software developers in general, and to requirements engineers and model-driven developers in particular. This article aims to bring those stakeholders together by providing an overview of the current state of traceability research and practice in both areas. As part of an extensive literature survey, we identify commonalities and differences in these areas and uncover several unresolved challenges which affect both domains. A good common foundation for further advances regarding these challenges appears to be a combination of the formal basis and the automated recording opportunities of MDD on the one hand, and the more holistic view of traceability in the requirements engineering domain on the other hand.