23-06-2012, 01:07 PM
A Conceptual Graph Approach to Support Multiperspective Development Environments
A Conceptual Graph Approach to Support Multiperspective Development Environments.pdf (Size: 133.99 KB / Downloads: 22)
INTRODUCTION
Motivation
A single system development technique is usually not adequate to construct analysis and design
models of a large-scale specification due to the complexity of the specification. Thus it is
necessary to decompose such specification into small, manageable parts to which a number of
appropriate development methods and tools can be applied. This, in turns, enables a specification
to be described from a number of ‘perspectives’. Moreover, these perspectives may be viewed in
different representation styles depending on selected development methods and tools.
Objective and Outline of the Paper
This paper demonstrates an application of CGs in the area of software engineering. Our proposal
is to use CGs to create underlying meta-representation models of multiperspective specifications.
Such models make it possible for us to implement a generic consistency checking procedure
which is independent of representation styles of the specifications. We have built a prototype
called the √iewer+CG to show such application of CGs in a ViewPoints-based framework.
Unlike the approach proposed in (Delugach, 1992a; Delugach, 1992b), we do not intend to apply
CGs to interpret the entire semantics of data models in different ViewPoint representation styles.
We contend that using a canonical form as such is not efficient. Firstly, it is difficult to identify a
single canonical form which can express all possible representation styles. Secondly, it is
difficult to implement a significant number of translation rules for the mapping between the
canonical form and the representation styles.
VIEWPOINT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (VOSE)
ViewPoints, or generally written as viewpoints, are used to represent a scope of knowledge or
interests of a system. The definition of viewpoints was initially employed to formalise
requirement acquisition and elicitation (Mullery, 1979; Leite, 1989). In requirement engineering,
viewpoints are seen as, for example, functions, sources and sinks of dataflows. The word
ViewPoint distinguishes this particular notion from other multiperspective approaches. The
ViewPoints concept (Finkelstein, et al., 1992) emphasises the partition of perspectives
corresponding to actors or roles in a development process. This notion of ViewPoints does not
constraint its use only for requirement analysis. It can also be applied to specification analysis
and design by partitioning both development tasks and specifications into ViewPoints.
THE SCENARIO
We present a scenario to demonstrate the application of CGs in the √iewer+CG environment.
Our scenario demonstrates the construction of a ViewPoint template, namely Structure and
Component Identification, and the development of a specification based on the template. The
template describes the process and the representation styles of a design step in the Constructive
Design Approach (Kramer, et al., 1990). The CDA was launched as a design technique for
distributed systems exploiting the CONIC (Magee, et al., 1989) facilities for distributed
programming. The CDA emphasises design mechanism for decomposing a system into a set of
components. The principle of the CDA is that a structure of potential distributed components of a
specification should be maintained throughout analysis and design process, thereby enhancing
reconfiguration for the specification.