G. Dedene
M. Snoeck
Abstract
Object Orientation has as primary goal to improve the software construction process. Object Oriented analysis, design and software construction should yield software of a high quality: software that is reliable, maintainable, extensible, adaptable. However, delivering large OO software systems in a qualitative way is a significant challenge. Scaling up requires formal precision of the semantics of the modelling techniques and languages used by the development team. And when the target system contains an abundance of parallelism, the problem of validation becomes unfeasible if it is not supported by formal techniques. With the incorporation of formal techniques in the development process, we can expect significant benefits in terms of software quality.For this reason, one might expect a high level of formality in current OOAD methods [9]. Unfortunately, most current OOAD methods are characterised by a low level of formality. The M.E.R.O.DE. methodology addresses this void. By making use of algebra, the methodology has been provided with a formal basis at several levels with a significant improvement of the quality of the software development process as a result.Before presenting M.E.R.O.DE. to the reader in the second section, the first section motivates the development of still another OOA method. The final section demonstrates how exactly the formal definition of M.E.R.O.DE. results in a gain of quality at the software specification level.
- [1] Alfred. V. Aho, Jeffrey D. Ullman, The theory of Parsing, Translation and Compiling. Volume I: Parsing, Prentice Hall, Series in Automatic Computation, 1972, 542 pp. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- [2] G. Booch, Object Oriented Devolpment, IEEE transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 12, No. 2, February 1986. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [3] G. Booch Object Oriented Design with Applications, Benjamin/Cummings, 1991. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [4] P.P. Chen, The Entity-Relationship Model-Toward a Unified View of Data, ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 1(1), March 1976, pp. 9-36. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [5] P.P. Chen, The Entity Relationship Approach to logical Database Design, QED information sciences Wellesley (Mass.), 1977. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [6] Peter Coad, Edward Yourdon, Object-Oriented analysis, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1991. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [7] Derek Coleman, Fiona Hayes, Stephen Bear, Introducing Objectcharts or How to Use Statecharts in Object Oriented Design, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 18, No. 1, January 1992, pp. 9-18. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [8] Alan M. Davis, A comparison of techniques for the specification of external system behavior, Communications of the ACM, Volume 31, No. 9, 1988, pp. 1098-1115. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [9] D. de Champeaux, P. America, D. Coleman, R. Duke, D. Lea, G. Leavens, Formal Techniques for OO Software Development (PANEL), OOPSLA'91 conference proceedings, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, pp. 166- 170. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [10] G. Dedene, A practical approach to Consistent Object Oriented Business Modeling, in Habrias H. (ed.), 5th Internationl Conference on: Putting into Practice Methods and Tools for Information System Design, Nantes, September 1992, pp. 175-186.Google Scholar
- [11] G. Dedene, Model-driven object-oriented development by examples (M.E.R.O.DE.), Object technology '93 conference, Cambridge (Uk), 30 march-1 april, 1993.Google Scholar
- [12] D.W. Embley, B.D. Kurtz, S.N. Woodfield, Object-Oriented Systems Analysis: A Model-Driven Approach, Yourdon Press, Prentice Hall, Eglewood Cliffs, 1992. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [13] David Harel, On visual formalisms, Communications of the ACM, Volume 31, No. 5, May 1988, pp. 514-530. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [14] Fiona Hayes, Derek Coleman, Coherent Models for Object Oriented Analysis, OOPSLA'91 conference proceedings, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, pp. 171-183. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [15] M.A. Jackson, J.R. Cameron, System Development, Prentice Hall Englewood Cliffs (N.J.), 1983, 418 pp. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [16] G. Kappel, M. Schrefl, Using an object-oriented diagram technique for the design of information systems, in H.G. Sol and K.M. van Hee (eds.), Dynamic Modeling of Information Systems, Eslevier Science Publishers B.V., North Holland, 1991, pp. 121-164.Google Scholar
- [17] Neil Lang, Shlaer-Mellor Object-Oriented Aanalysis Rules, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 18(1), January 1993, pp. 54-58. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [18] B. Meyer, Object Oriented Software Construction, Prentice Hall International, 1988. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [19] David E. Monarchi, Gretchen, I. Puhr, A Research Typology for Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Communications of the ACM, September 1992, 35(9), pp. 35-47. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [20] P.A. Ng, J.F. Paul, A formal definition of Entity-Relationship Models in P.P. Chen (ed.), Entity Relationship Approach to Systems Analysis and Design, North-Holland Publishing Company, 1980, pp. 211-230. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [21] James. L. Peterson, Petri net theory and the modeling of systems, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.Y., 1981. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [22] J. Rumbaugh, M. Blaha, W. Premerlani, F. Eddy, W. Lorensen, Object Oriented Modeling and Design, Prentice Hall Internationl, 1991. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [23] S. Shlaer, S.J. Mellor, Object-Oriented Systems Analysis: Modeling the World in Data, Prentice Hall, 1988. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [24] S. Shlaer, S.J. Mellor, Object Lifecycles: Modeling the World in States, Prentice Hall, 1992. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [25] M. Snoeck Defining a Process Algebra for detecting deadlocks in M.E.R.O.DE. specifications, Department of Applied Economic Sciences, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, research report 9303, 1993 (in Dutch).Google Scholar
- [26] M. Snoeck, A Formalism for Object Behaviour, Department of Applied Economic Sciences, K.U. Leuven, research report 9321, 1993.Google Scholar
- [27] J.F. Sowa and J.A. Zachman, Extending and Formalizing the framework for infotmation systems architecture, IBM Systems Journal, 31(3), 1992. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [28] M. Verhelst, Objectgerichte Systeemontwikkeling: een Praktische aanpak met JSD en M.E.R.O.DE., Kluwer, Deventer, 1992, 334 pp. (an English version from the same author is to be published).Google Scholar
- [29] R. Wirfs Brock, B. Wilkerson, L. Wiener, Designing Object Oriented Software, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1990. Google ScholarDigital Library
- [30] J.A. Zachman, A framework for Information Architecture, IBM Systems Journal, 26(3), 1987. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- M.E.R.O.DE.: a model-driven entity-relationship object-oriented Development method
Recommendations
Model consistency in the object oriented software development process
OOPSLA '03: Companion of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applicationsModel Refinement is a relationship that relates two elements representing the same concept at different levels of abstraction. In UML, Refinement is described in an informal way.To avoid wrong model interpretations, we study a formalization of the ...
Example-driven meta-model development
The intensive use of models in model-driven engineering (MDE) raises the need to develop meta-models with different aims, such as the construction of textual and visual modelling languages and the specification of source and target ends of model-to-...
A rational approach to model-driven development
Model-driven software developmentModels, modeling, and model transformation form the basis for a set of software development approaches that are known as model-driven development (MDD). Models are used in reasoning about a problem domain and the corresponding solution domain for some ...
Comments