A comparison of four process metamodels and the creation of a new generic standard
Section snippets
An introduction to metamodelling for software development methodologies
Software development processes and methodologies have always been described in terms suitable for use by the developer. They talk about what tasks and techniques should be used, what sort of lifecycle is appropriate (e.g. waterfall) and how these process elements should be organised in time and assigned to people. They are often described in a manual or published as a book that the project manager and his/her team of developers follow closely. Previous comparisons of OO processes for software
Current metamodels
The use of metamodels to underpin object-oriented processes was pioneered in the mid-1990s by the OPEN Consortium (http://www.open.org.au) leading to the current version of the OPEN Process Framework (OPF) [5]. The Object Management Group then issued a request for proposals for what turned into the software processing engineering metamodel (SPEM) [3]. In parallel, the capability assessment community, under the auspices of an EU funded project called OOSPICE, also developed a metamodel directed
Background and philosophy for a standard metamodel
Sources such as the OPF and OOSPICE and LiveNet have some specificity in their domains such that they provide significant detail in the domains to which they are addressed. The SPEM aims to be more generic and thus offers significantly less detail, leaving these details to be added at the M1 level by individual methodologists. In this section, we outline the process of merging ideas from these four metamodels (Section 2) into a single new generic standard (SMSDM).
We adopt a minimalist approach
Standard metamodel proposal
The metamodels described in Section 2 contain some problems related to mismatches between process and product metaclasses [15] and to the problems posed by the impossibility of ‘inheriting’ attributes across metalevels. Some ‘solutions’ to this latter problem are solved in terms of potency [16] or in terms of powertypes [10]. As a possible solution to assist in the construction of SMSDM, we reject potency due to its lack of underpinning theory and develop the idea of powertypes, first proposed
Mappings to other metamodelling approaches
Terminology agreement or, in the case of differences, mapping between terminology sets is critical to understanding the true semantics of a metamodel and how it might apply in various domains and methodological approaches.
Table 2 shows how the SMSDM terms are realized in the four metamodels we have investigated in this paper. Since the SMSDM attempts to be comprehensive across the several domains of these four metamodels, it is not surprising that it covers more concepts than any other
Summary and conclusions
We have demonstrated here how the newly proposed SMSDM encompasses four well-known metamodel ‘standards’ (SPEM, OPF, OOSPICE and LiveNet) thus offering a generic metamodel that can be both standardized ([9]) and also offer each of these four metamodels essentially as a reasonable subset. To facilitate this, we have delineated mappings between the various and varied terminologies used in all five metamodels (Table 2). Finally, we have included a partial example to show how the SMSDM (and by
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the Australian Research Council (grant number DP0211675) for financial support for this work. This is Contribution number 03/19 of the Centre for Object Technology Application and Research.
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