Run-Time Evolution through Explicit Meta-Objects

Software must be constantly adapted due to evolving domain knowledge and unanticipated requirements changes. To adapt a system at run-time we need to reflect on its structure and its behavior. Object-oriented languages introduced reflection to deal with this issue, however, no reflective approach up to now has tried to provide a unified solution to both structural and behavioral reflection. This paper describes Albedo, a unified approach to structural and behavioral reflection. Albedo is a model of fined-grained unanticipated dynamic structural and behavioral adaptation. Instead of providing reflective capabilities as an external mechanism we integrate them deeply in the environment. We show how explicit meta-objects allow us to provide a range of reflective features and thereby evolve both application models and environments at run-time

Threshold Concepts in Object-Oriented Modelling

Proponents of the object-oriented (OO) paradigm frequently claim that the OO paradigm is ‘more natural’ than the procedural paradigm because the world is filled with objects that have both attributes and behaviors. However students in higher education generally experience considerable difficulty in understanding OO concepts and acquiring the necessary skills in object-oriented analysis and design. This paper proposes OO modelling to be a set of threshold concepts and describes a study that sought to improve undergraduate students’ learning of OO modelling by adopting concept maps as ‘stepping stones’ to facilitate the development of analysis class and sequence diagrams