Andreas Bartho

DropsBox: the Dresden Open Software Toolbox

The Dresden Open Software Toolbox (DropsBox) is a software modelling toolbox consisting of a set of open source tools developed by the Software Technology Group at TU Dresden. The DropsBox is built on top of the Eclipse Platform and the Eclipse Modeling Framework. The DropsBox contributes to the development and application of domain-specific language changes (DSLs) in model-driven software development. It can be customised by tool and language developers to support various activities of a DSL’s life cycle ranging from language design to language application and evolution. In this paper, we provide an overview of the DSL life cycle, the DropsBox tools, and their interaction on a common example. Furthermore, we discuss our experiences in developing and integrating tools for DropsBox in an academic environment.

Creating and maintaining tutorials with DEFT

Good documentation is crucial for frameworks to be used correctly. One important kind of framework documentation are tutorials. They tell how to use the framework and provide additional code examples. However, tutorials are rare compared to other kinds of documentation such as API documentation due to high creation and maintenance costs. In this paper we highlight the problems of writing and maintaining tutorials. Then we present the Development Environment For Tutorials (DEFT), which provides support to address the identified problems.

Elucidative development for model-based documentation

Documentation is an essential activity in software development, for source code as well as modelling artefacts. Typically, documentation is created and maintained manually which leads to inconsistencies as documented artefacts like source code or models evolve during development. Existing approaches like literate/elucidative programming or literate modelling address these problems by deriving documentation from software development artefacts or vice versa. However, these approaches restrict themselves to a certain kind of artefact and to a certain phase of the software development life-cycle. In this paper, we propose elucidative development as a generalisation of these approaches supporting heterogeneous kinds of artefacts as well as the analysis, design and implementation phases of the software development life-cycle. Elucidative development links source code and model artefacts into documentation and thus, maintains and updates their presentation semi-automatically. We present DEFT as an integrated development environment for elucidative development. We show, how DEFT can be applied to language specifications like the UML specification and help to avoid inconsistencies caused by maintenance and evolution of such a specification.

Trustworthy instantiation of frameworks

Frameworks are large building blocks of systems, encapsulating the commonalities of a family of applications. For reuse of these common features, frameworks are instantiated by smaller-sized components, plugins, to specific products. However, the framework instantiation process is often difficult, because not all aspects of the interplay of the framework and its plugins can be captured by standard type systems. Application developers instantiating a framework often fail to develop correct applications. Thus, this paper surveys several typical framework instantiation problems. A simple facet-based classification of the problems is given. It is shown how the different problem classes are related to phases of the software process and how they can be tackled appropriately. Finally, the paper derives several research challenges, in particular, the challenge to define appropriate framework instantiation languages.

Ontology-Guided Software Engineering in the MOST Workbench

This chapter reports about the software process guidance in ontology-driven software development (ODSD), one of the core ontology-enabled services of the ODSD environments. Ontology-driven software process guidance amounts to a significant step forward in software engineering in general (cf. Fig. 1.1 on p. 3). Its role is to guide developers through a complex software development process by providing information about the consistency of artefacts and about the tasks to be accomplished to reach a particular development goal.

Case Studies for Marrying Ontology and Software Technologies

In this chapter, we conclude Part I with several industrial case studies for motivating consistency-preserving software development. Many of these case studies will be revisited in later chapters, in particular Chaps. 9 and 10. Many of the solutions are based on the scalable reasoning technologies to be introduced in Chap. 5. The rest of this chapter is organised as follows. Section. 4.1 shows which problems companies meet when they want to specify correct and consistent domain models of telecommunication device configurations. Another case study (Sect. 4.2) treats consistency preservation for behavioural models (process models). In business process refinement, the more concrete, refined processes have to conform to the abstract business processes the consultant specified. Showing this form of consistency of refinement is not easy for the process architect, as it turns out. Section 4.3 presents the problem of consistency of product lines, their correct modelling of their variant spaces and the consistent selection of their variants.

Guidance in Business Process Modelling

This chapter shows how process modellers can be supported by guidance. If a telecommunication provider introduces a value-added service, this might involve the establishment of new business processes, whose specification is not trivial. A guidance engine can help a process engineer develop a new business process by stepwise refining, i.e. creating a more concrete version of the process from an abstract version. The guidance engine identifies inconsistencies and proposes possible refinement steps. The topics covered in this chapter range from theoretical foundations of business process refinement over the formalisation of refinement problems in ontologies to implementation issues. The presented solutions were developed in the MOST project.