German Vega

Reuse and variability in large software applications

Reuse has always been a major goal in software engineering, since it promises large gains in productivity, quality and time to market reduction. Practical experience has shown that substantial reuse has only successfully happened in two cases: libraries, where many generic and small components can be found; and product lines, where domains-specific components can be assembled in different ways to produce variations of a given product.In this paper we examine how product lines have successfully achieved reuse of coarse-grained components, and the underlying factors limiting this approach to narrowly scoped domains. We then build on this insight to present an approach, called software federation, which proposes a mechanism to overcome the identified limitations, and therefore makes reuse of coarse-grained components possible over a larger range of applications. Our approach extends and generalizes the product line approach, extending the concepts and mechanisms available to manage variability. The system is in use in different companies, validating the claims made in this paper.

Composing domain-specific languages for wide-scope software engineering applications

Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) offer many advantages over general languages, but their narrow scope makes them really effective only in very focused domains, for example Product Lines. The recent Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach seeks to provide a technology to compose and combine models coming from different metamodels. Adapted to DSL, it means that it should be possible to compose ”programs” written in different DSLs, which will enable the use of the DSL approach to build applications spanning different domains. The paper presents the Mélusine environment, where such a composition technology has been developed and experimented.

An Approach and Framework for Extensible Process Support System

The issue of building a Process Support System Environment (PSSE), or a family of PSEE, to make them interoperate or to use them to pilot applications or services requires new solutions; there is almost no hope for a single system to address correctly all the issues.

SEEMP: An Semantic Interoperability Infrastructure for e-Government Services in the Employment Sector

This paper presents SEEMP, a marketplace to coordinate and integrate public and private employment services (ESs) around the EU Member States. The need for flexible collaboration in the marketplace gives rise to the issue of interoperability in both data exchange and share of services. SEEMP proposes a mixed approach that relies on the concepts of services and semantics. SEEMP approach combines Software Engineering and Semantic Web methodologies/tools in an infrastructure that allows for a meaningful service-based communication among ESs.

Domain Specific Engineering Environments

Computer aided software engineering tools represent one the main successes of software engineering in the past decades. They however need to be improved along several dimensions in order to face new challenges due to ever more complex applications, more heterogeneous technologies and more stakeholders involved. In this paper, we present an approach based on the concept of domain. We define a domain as an area in which a number of stakeholders is repeatedly performing similar activities. In a project, an arbitrary number of domains can be identified, being business, technical, or related to life cycle activities. In our metamodel-based approach, any domain can be easily modelled and the corresponding computer aided domain specific engineering environment (CADSE) can be generated. Using CADSE composition, complete and wide scope engineering environments can be built as a composition of an arbitrary number of domains. The paper presents the approach, the technology and draws a few lessons of the first years of use in a number of real projects.

Defining and supporting concurrent engineering policies in SCM

Software Configuration Management addresses roughly two areas, the first and older one concerns the storage of the entities produced during the software project; the second one concerns the control of the activities performed for the production / change of these entities. Work space support can be seen as subsuming most of the later dimension. Indeed, work space is the place where activities take place; controlling the activities, to a large extent, is work space control. This short paper presents our concurrent engineering experience in Dassault Systemes, as well as our new approach in the modeling and support of concurrent engineering for large teams.

Reconciling software configuration management and product data management

Product Data Management (PDM) and Software Configuration Management (SCM) are the disciplines of building and controlling the evolution of a complex artifacts; either physical or software. Surprisingly, these two fields have evolved independently; their respective solutions to the same problems are incompatible and their properties are different. PDM is good at modeling while SCM is good at building and supporting concurrent engineering. From a software engineering perspective, the challenge is to take the full potential of strong modeling capabilities, while preserving good concurrent engineering support. The paper shows that rich modeling, flexible evolution, and concurrent engineering supports have conflicting requirements and that a solution requires rethinking the concepts of evolution, versioning and modeling. We have developed a system, called CADSE (Computer Aided Domain Specific Environment), in which a product (software, physical or both) is modeled in a way similar to PDM and in which concurrent engineering and evolution is supported in the SCM way. To that end, the system is driven by models; evolution alone being defined through different models. The paper describes our system and discusses the early lessons of its first years of practical use.

Coevolution assistance for enterprise architecture models

When metamodels evolve, model conformity may be broken. This forces the owners of the models (modelers) to intervene because it is impossible to automatically discover what to change in order to regain conformity. This paper presents ASIMOV, a platform for model and metamodel co-evolution based on two hypothesis: i) a metamodeler knows the rationale behind metamodel changes, and is capable of providing guidelines for model coevolution; ii) the modeler is the only one in grade of making final decisions about his models. ASIMOV provides two languages for metamodelers: ASIMOV Evolution, to specify changes in the metamodels; and ASIMOV Assistance, to propose corresponding changes in the models. Also, ASIMOV Engine solves automatically the changes in models that can be automatically solved and assists modelers in coevolving their models to regain conformity. Moreover, modelers can adapt the proposed changes to suit their particular needs, introducing additional information when it is required. ASIMOV is here illustrated in the context of Enterprise Architecture projects.

Evolution control in MDE projects: controlling model and code co-evolution

The dream of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is that Software Engineering activities should be performed only on models, but in practice a significant amount of programming is still being performed. There is a clear need to keep code and models strongly synchronized when they represent the same entities at different levels of abstraction. We observe that versioning is ill supported by MDE tools, and that no strong synchronization is ensured between code and model versions. This, among other things, explains why MDE is not widely adopted in industry. This paper presents the solution developed in the CADSE project for providing consistent support for model and code co-evolution. It is shown that it requires to (1) define, what evolution policy is to be applied, (2) closely synchronize both ways, the model entities and the computer artifacts, and (3) enforce consistency constraints and evolution policies during the commit and check-out of both model elements and their corresponding artifacts.

Extensibility and Modularity for Model Driven Engineering Environments

Model Driven Engineering has shown the feasibility to generate tools (editors, analyzers …) from models and for a domain. Unfortunately these generated tools are much focused while a large application spans different domains and different activities; currently these tools do not support concurrent engineering, and incomplete life cycle support. In a similar way we developed a technology capable of generating a complete Computer Aided Domain Specific Environment (CADSE) from a set of model and metamodels describing the specific domain and the environment behavior. Our technology solves the above two problems, allowing defining a number of CADSE addressing specific activities, as extensions and adaptation of a core CADSE; and relying on workspaces. CADSEs workspaces are model driven; they contain tools, models and usual artifacts (code, documents...); they support different activities by switching from an activity to another one, and concurrent engineering is supported through import/commit applied to models, metamodels and artifacts.