Constraint specification by example in a Meta-CASE tool

Abstract

CASE tools are very helpful to software engineers in different ways and in different phases of software development. However, they are not easy to specialise to meet the needs of particular application domains or particular software modelling requirements. Meta-CASE tools offer a way of providing such specialisation by enabling a designer to specify a tool which is then generated automatically. Constraints are often used in such meta-CASE tools as a technique for governing the syntax and semantics of model elements and the values of their attributes. However, although constraint definition is a difficult process it has attracted relatively little research attention. The PhD research described here presents an approach for improving the process of CASE tool constraint specification based on the notion of programming by example (or demonstration). The feasibility of the approach will be demonstrated via experiments with a prototype using the meta-CASE tool Diagram Editor Constraints System (DECS) as context