A PROCESS META-MODEL IN A GRADUAL SOFTWARE PROCESS IMPLEMENTATION ENVIRONMENT - Process Meta-Model for a Software Process Definition and Improvement

Sandro Ronaldo Bezerra Oliveira, Alexandre Marcos Lins de Vasconcelos, José Francisco Pereira and Igor Cavalcanti Ramos

PSEE - Process-centered Software Engineering Environment - PSEE has one of its intentions to provide that phases of the software process life cycle (definition, simulation, enacting and evaluation) can be automatized. This work presents the structure and the automation of a software process meta-model capable to group terminologies of processes based on quality models/norms and to help in the implementation and refinement these types of processes. This implementation must be made from characteristics and properties that define an organization or a specific domain of software project. The meta-model services were automatized trough a tool and the description of them can be found in this paper.

A META-MODELLING APPROACH TO EXPRESS CHANGE REQUIREMENTS

Anne Etien, Colette Rolland, Camille Salinesi

Organisations have to evolve frequently in order to remain competitive and to take into account changes in their environment. We develop a co-evolution approach to jointly make evolve the information system and the business processes. This approach relies on an explicit specification of change requirements defined with operators expressing gaps between the As-Is and the To-Be situations. However, such gaps based approach can also be used in an other evolution context, when a database or a workflow model evolves. Thus, instead of specifying new operators associated to the Map meta-model used in this co-evolution approach, we propose to define a generic typology of gaps to facilitate a precise definition of change requirements under the form of gaps. The paper presents the approach to generate a gap typology and illustrates it with the Map meta-model.

MODEL-DRIVEN HMI DEVELOPMENT – CAN META-CASE TOOLS RELIEVE THE PAIN?

Detlef Zuehlke and Carsten Bock

Today metamodeling and domain-specific languages represent many promising beginnings to create nongeneric tool support for individual modeling tasks. Due to the inherent complexity and numerious variants of human-machine interfaces (HMIs) model-driven development becomes increasingly interesting for manufacturers and suppliers in the automobile industry. Particularly, the development of powerful user interfaces requires appropriate development processes as well as easy-to-use software tools. Since suitable tool kits are missing in the field of HMI development this paper describes the utilization of visual domain-specific languages for model-driven useware engineering in general and model-based specification of automotive HMIs in special. Moreover, results from a survey among developers are presented revealing the requirements for HMI specific tool support. Additionally, experiences with using current meta-CASE tools as well as standard office applications for creating a visual domain-specific language are presented. Based on these experiences requirements for future meta-CASE tools are derived.

A GENERIC MODEL FOR CONNECTING MODELS IN A MULTILEVEL MODELLING FRAMEWORK

Jan Pettersen Nytun

In science and elsewhere models are weaved together forming complex knowledge structures. This article presents a generic way of connecting models both vertically and horizontally in a multilevel modelling framework. One model can be connected vertically to several models allowing a model element to be an instance of several metaclasses and different views can then be managed in an integrated way. Models at the same level can also be connected by defining the correspondence between model elements. We consider a model to be a graph composed of structure (form) and symbols (names); symbols identify structure inside or/and outside the model. A set of symbols belonging to a model can form a border; two models are connected when one border from each model is connected; two borders are connected when there is established a correspondence between the symbols of the two borders. A model is to a large extent defined by the role it plays in relation to what it models, such a role can again be described with models. When two models are connected the two borders involved can each have a model connected that in some sense describes the border; also the correspondence between two symbols can have a model describing the correspondence; of course these models can again in some way be connected.