Shigeru Miyake

OCL4X: An Action Semantics Language for UML Model Execution

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is widely used for software modeling. UML is not defined precisely enough for unambiguous model execution. Therefore, the first and most important requirement for model execution is precisely modeling the actions. An action takes a set of inputs and converts them into a set of outputs, where either or both sets may be empty. It is the fundamental unit of behavior specification. So a precise action semantics language (ASL) and a specified syntax are required. Unfortunately, actions defined in UML do not have a concrete syntax and OMG does not recommend a specific language, so there is not a standard ASL. Object Constraint Language (OCL) is a formal language used to describe expressions on UML models. It is a specification language, but not a programming language. The high overlap between ASL and OCL suggests that OCL can be used partly for ASL. OCL for Execution (OCL4X) is defined based on OCL to implement operations that have side effects and provide the ability for model execution. By mapping from ASL to OCL, we use OCL to express some actions in ASL. New syntax constructs are added to the standard OCL, together with their semantics. Finally, an example is given to show how to use OCL4X.

An Executable UML with OCL-based Action Semantics Language

Executable UML allows precisely describing the software system at a higher level of abstraction. It bridges the semantics gap between the UML design models and the implementation. The executable models can be translated to a less abstract programming language completely or executed in a virtual machine directly. Existing executable UMLs lack a formal and standardized Action Semantics Language (ASL). Object Constraint Language (OCL), as a formal specification language, is a standard published by Object Management Group (OMG) along with UML. It is used to describe constraints for UML models. In this paper, we propose an executable UML with OCL-based ASL (OxUML) by extending OCL to support actions with side effects. We present its support environment-UML Virtual Machine (UVM) and suggest a Model-Driven Development (MDD) process with OxUML. We also introduce an example to demonstrate how to build and process OxUML models.

Solution Proposals for Japan-Oriented Offshore Software Development in China

Surveys on the Japan-oriented vendors in China were conducted twice to find out the existent problems in the Japan-oriented offshore software development. From these survey results, four main problems were found out, which were the frequent requirement changes from the product owner, the misunderstanding of the requirement specification in the vendor side, the heavy overhead of the project management and the low-efficiency communication between the product owner and the vendor. Several solutions are proposed to solve these four problems, which mainly consist of the improvement of the offshore software development process and the development of the offshore development supporting tools. The proposed offshore development process is based on the application of the prototype development, the iteration development and the customer test driven development processes. The proposed offshore development supporting tools include the project management assistant tool and the communication assistant tool.

Survey on Japan-oriented offshore software development in China

In order to find out the main features and the existent problems in the Japan-oriented offshore software development in China, a survey was conducted in 24 Japan-oriented offshore companies. The questionnaire included the company information, the project information, the software development process, and the existent problems and expectations. The survey results were classified and analyzed according to the company scale and the project style. The analysis results showed that almost all of the basic features of the projects, the software development process and the existent problems had close relations with the company scale and the project type. Finally, based on the survey results some solution suggestions were proposed for the Japan-oriented offshore software development.

HOPE: extensible system for automatic & periodic Diagnosis of offshore software project

In order to support the management of the offshore projects, HOPE (Hitachi Offshore Project Examiner) is developed based on some open source tools. HOPE can automatically collect the raw project data, organize them in the database, calculate the different data granularities, analyze the project indexes, detect the exception/release information according to some specified rules, and generate the HTML reports for the offshore projects. Furthermore, HOPE can be executed periodically according to the schedule specified by the user. To ensure HOPE adapt to the different users, an extensible plug-in architecture is designed. Both the data collection and the project diagnosis are implemented by the customizable plug-ins.