Steven Kelly

MetaEdit+: A Fully Configurable Multi-User and Multi-Tool CASE and CAME Environment

Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) environments have spread at a lower pace than expected. One reason for this is the immaturity of existing environments in supporting development in-the-large and by-many and their inability to address the varying needs of the software developers. In this paper we report on the development of a next generation CASE environment called MetaEdit+. The environment seeks to overcome all the above deficiencies, but in particular pays attention to catering for the varying needs of the software developers. MetaEdit+ is a multi-method, multi-tool platform for both CASE and Computer Aided Method Engineering (CAME). As a CASE tool it establishes a versatile and powerful multi-tool environment which enables flexible creation, maintenance, manipulation, retrieval and representation of design information among multiple developers. As a CAME environment it offers an easy-to-use yet powerful environment for method specification, integration, management and re-use. The paper explains the motivation for developing MetaEdit+, its design goals and philosophy and discusses the functionality of the CAME tools.

Worst Practices for Domain-Specific Modeling

Interest in creating domain-specific modeling (DSM) languages is surging, but little guidance is available on how to do it right. Along with heeding best practices, learning what not to do-including how to handle common pitfalls and recognize troublesome areas-can help first-time developers. The authors have identified several worst practices based on an analysis of 76 DSM cases spanning 15 years, four continents, several tools, around 100 language creators, and projects with from three to more than 300 modelers. They present these worst practices in the order that language developers would encounter them over the life of a project.

The State of the Art in Language Workbenches. Conclusions from the Language Workbench Challenge

Language workbenches are tools that provide high-level mechanisms for the implementation of (domain-specific) languages. Language workbenches are an active area of research that also receives many contributions from industry. To compare and discuss existing language workbenches, the annual Language Workbench Challenge was launched in 2011. Each year, participants are challenged to realize a given domain-specific language with their workbenches as a basis for discussion and comparison. In this paper, we describe the state of the art of language workbenches as observed in the previous editions of the Language Workbench Challenge. In particular, we capture the design space of language workbenches in a feature model and show where in this design space the participants of the 2013 Language Workbench Challenge reside. We compare these workbenches based on a DSL for questionnaires that was realized in all workbenches.

Defining domain-specific modeling languages to automate product derivation: collected experiences

Domain-Specific Modeling offers a language-based approach to raise the level of abstraction in order to speed up development work and set variation space already at specification and design phase. In this paper we identify approaches that are applied for defining languages that enable automated variant derivation. This categorization is based on analyzing over 20 industrial cases of DSM language definition.

Evaluating and comparing language workbenches

Language workbenches are environments for simplifying the creation and use of computer languages. The annual Language Workbench Challenge (LWC) was launched in 2011 to allow the many academic and industrial researchers in this area an opportunity to quantitatively and qualitatively compare their approaches. We first describe all four LWCs to date, before focussing on the approaches used, and results generated, during the third LWC. We give various empirical data for ten approaches from the third LWC. We present a generic feature model within which the approaches can be understood and contrasted. Finally, based on our experiences of the existing LWCs, we propose a number of benchmark problems for future LWCs. HighlightsWe describe the challenges posed by the 4 Language Workbench Challenges run so far.We establish a feature model that captures the design space of language workbenches.We classify 10 language workbenches according to our feature model.We present empirical data on 10 implementations of a questionnaire DSL.We propose benchmark problems to be used in future Language Workbench Challenges.

MetaEdit+: defining and using integrated domain-specific modeling languages

With MetaEdit+ you can build Domain-Specific Modeling languages and tools - without having to write a single line of code. This demonstration shows how different domain-specific languages (DSLs) can be integrated with high-level metamodels, how languages can be created iteratively while automatically updating existing models, and how multiple modelers can work together seamlessly.

What is Needed in a MetaCASE Environment

In this paper we look at ways of effectively implementing software development environments through metaCASE tools. MetaCASE tools offer fast and economical means of supporting tailored or homegrown systems development methods, yet they have not been taken into use widely due to their perceived complexity and the lack of development process maturity in most organisations. We offer a list of generic requirements for these tools and demonstrate their use through evaluating the MetaEdit+ tool against these requirements. The requirements are gathered from existing literature on method engineering.

Evolution and issues in metaCASE

Abstract Customizable CASE environments (metaCASE) have begun to emerge in the marketplace. They offer tools and facilities for flexible method support and adaptation. This paper gives some views on the history of customizable CASE and metamodelling. The most difficult issues on the way to an integrated metaCASE environment are addressed, including representational problems, conceptual problems such as storing and processing recursive structures, method integration problems, and problems in creating repository support for metaCASE. These areas, and the divisions between them, are shown to need further work before a truly integrated metaCASE environment can be produced.

Integrating models with domain-specific modeling languages

Model integration is inescapable: any non-trivial system will be too large to fit sensibly in a single model. The model will have to be split, maybe into different aspects or languages, different modeler roles and tasks, different phases of the software development life cycle, etc. In Domain-Specific Modeling, the possibilities to integrate models are fundamentally better than with general-purpose languages as the company has full access to the language definitions. We describe and compare different ways to integrate DSM models, based on real world experience of what has been shown to work in practice on industrial scales.

A matrix editor for a metaCASE environment

Abstract Research in metaCASE or CASE shells has largely focused on supporting methods by allowing the definition of the concepts and representational symbols used in their diagrams. Little interest has been shown in environments supporting representational paradigms other than diagrams, such as matrices or (hyper-)text. The matrix in particular is often a better format for business information systems, metamodelling, and automatic algorithms for decomposing a system. This paper presents a set of functional requirements for a matrix editor for a metaCASE environment, and suggests a user interface for such an editor, using experience from the design of the Matrix Editor for MetaEdit+, under development in the MetaPHOR project at the University of Jyvaskyla.