Incremental software design modelling

  • Authors:

  • Omar Alam;Jörg Kienzle

  • Affiliations:

  • McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada;McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '13 Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

In this paper we investigate how a software designer can build a complex software design model incrementally by exploiting model interfaces and information hiding to encapsulate different design concerns within model increments. Each model increment either extends or customizes the model it is applied to. When using model extension, each increment adds modelling elements to the existing model to provide additional structure and behaviour. When using model customization, each increment adds modelling elements to adapt the general structure and behaviour of the model to a specific need. We discuss how incremental modelling fits with software development processes, and show how different model composition techniques, i.e. class merge, subclassing, operation in-lining and advising, support the incremental extension and customization of models. Finally, we explain how to generate the complete software design in the end. Practically, we present how we extended the Reusable Aspect Models (RAM) approach to support incremental modelling and show details of an incremental design of a workflow middleware product line.