An architecture and methodology for the design and development of Technical Information Systems

In order to meet demands in the context of Technical Information Systems (TIS) pertaining to reliability, extensibility, maintainability, etc., we have developed an architectural framework with accompanying methodological guidelines for designing such systems. With the framework, we aim at complex multiapplication information systems using a repository to share data among applications. The framework proposes to keep a strict separation between Man-Machine-Interface and Model data, and provides design and implementation support to do this effectively.\ud The framework and methodological guidelines have been developed in the context of the ESPRIT project IMPRESS. The project also provided for ldquotesting groundsrdquo in the form of a TIS for the Spanish Electricity company Iberdrola.\ud This work has been conducted within the ESPRIT project IMPRESS (Integrated, Multi-Paradigm, Reliable and Extensible Storage System), ESPRIT No. 635

Monitoring-Oriented Programming: A Tool-Supported Methodology for Higher Quality Object-Oriented Software

This paper presents a tool-supported methodological paradigm for object-oriented software development, called monitoring-oriented programming and abbreviated MOP, in which runtime monitoring is a basic software design principle. The general idea underlying MOP is that software developers insert specifications in their code via annotations. Actual monitoring code is automatically synthesized from these annotations before compilation and integrated at appropriate places in the program, according to user-defined configuration attributes. This way, the specification is checked at runtime against the implementation. Moreover, violations and/or validations of specifications can trigger user-defined code at any points in the program, in particular recovery code, outputting or sending messages, or raising exceptions. The MOP paradigm does not promote or enforce any specific formalism to specify requirements: it allows the users to plug-in their favorite or domain-specific specification formalisms via logic plug-in modules. There are two major technical challenges that MOP supporting tools unavoidably face: monitor synthesis and monitor integration. The former is heavily dependent on the specification formalism and comes as part of the corresponding logic plug-in, while the latter is uniform for all specification formalisms and depends only on the target programming language. An experimental prototype tool, called Java-MOP, is also discussed, which currently supports most but not all of the desired MOP features. MOP aims at reducing the gap between formal specification and implementation, by integrating the two and allowing them together to form a system

Requirements traceability in model-driven development: Applying model and transformation conformance

The variety of design artifacts (models) produced in a model-driven design process results in an intricate relationship between requirements and the various models. This paper proposes a methodological framework that simplifies management of this relationship, which helps in assessing the quality of models, realizations and transformation specifications. Our framework is a basis for understanding requirements traceability in model-driven development, as well as for the design of tools that support requirements traceability in model-driven development processes. We propose a notion of conformance between application models which reduces the effort needed for assessment activities. We discuss how this notion of conformance can be integrated with model transformations