Model Transformation Technologies in the Context of Modelling Software Systems

Programming technologies have improved continuously during the last decades, but from an Information Systems perspective, some well-known problems associated to the design and implementation of an Information Systems persists. Object-Oriented Methods, Formal Specification Languages, Component-Based Software Production... This is just a very short list of technologies proposed to solve a very old and, at the same time, very well-known problem: how to produce software of quality. Programming has been the key task during the last 40 years, and the results have not been successful yet. This work will explore the need of facing a sound software production process from a different perspective: the non-programming perspective, where by non-programming we mainly mean modeling. Instead of talking about Extreme Programming, we will introduce a Extreme Non-Programming (Extreme Modeling-Oriented) approach. We will base our ideas on the intensive work done during the last years, oriented to the objective of generating code from a higher-level system specification, normally represented as a Conceptual Schema. Nowadays, though, the hip around MDA has given a new push to these strategies. New methods propose sound model transformations which cover all the different steps of a sound software production process from an Information Systems Engineering point of view. This must include Organizational Modeling, Requirements Engineering, Conceptual Modeling and Model-Based Code Generation techniques. In this context, it seems that the time of Model Transformation Technologies is finally here..

Linking requirements specification with interaction design and implementation

Abstract: One challenging goal in the context of Software Engineering (SE) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is to provide appropriate bridges between the most well-known software production methods and techniques. SE is supposed to be strong in specifying functional requirements, while HCI is centred on defining user interaction at the appropriate level of abstraction. In any case, general-perspective software production methods that combine most functional-oriented, conventional requirements specification with the most interaction-oriented, user interface modelling are strongly required. In this paper, we present a specific approach in this context, intended to properly combine a sound functional requirements specification with an abstract model of the user interface represented by a CTT model. When the functional specification is enriched with such an interaction model, it is easier to derive the final software implementation that will represent both the structure and behaviour of the system and the user interaction. The presented approach has been successfully implemented in a MDA-based approach called Oliva Nova Model Execution, demonstrating that Conceptual Modeling-based strategies are more powerful when user interaction and system behaviour are modelled within a unified view

Métodos de ingeniería web dirigidos por modelos: una revisión de literatura

RESUMEN: Este artículo presenta algunos de los métodos de ingeniería Web dirigida por modelos que se han propuesto. En él se discuten y analizan las ventajas y desventajas de dichos métodos con relación a las tendencias actuales y las mejores prácticas en la ingeniería dirigida por modelos. La idea es presentar cada método y analizar los modelos que propone para representar aplicaciones Web, los aspectos arquitectónicos en las transformaciones y el uso de tecnologías actuales de interfaz de usuario Web en el código generado. Esto se hace con el fin de vislumbrar posibles líneas de investigación para trabajos futuros en el área de la ingeniería Web dirigida por modelos.ABSTRACT: This paper presents some of the model-driven Web engineering methods that have been proposed, and discusses and analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of such methods regarding current tendencies and best practices on model-driven engineering. The idea is to present each approach and analyze the models they propose to represent Web applications, the architectural aspects in the transformations, and the use of current Web user interface technologies in the generated code. This is done in order to depict possible research lines for future works on the model-driven Web engineering area

Supporting Automatic Interoperability in Model-Driven Development Processes

By analyzing the last years of software development evolution, it is possible to observe that the involved technologies are increasingly focused on the definition of models for the specification of the intended software products. This model-centric development schema is the main ingredient for the Model-Driven Development (MDD) paradigm. In general terms, the MDD approaches propose the automatic generation of software products by means of the transformation of the defined models into the final program code. This transformation process is also known as model compilation process. Thus, MDD is oriented to reduce (or even eliminate) the hand-made programming, which is an error-prone and time-consuming task. Hence, models become the main actors of the MDD processes: the models are the new programming code. In this context, the interoperability can be considered a natural trend for the future of model-driven technologies, where different modeling approaches, tools, and standards can be integrated and coordinated to reduce the implementation and learning time of MDD solutions as well as to improve the quality of the final software products. However, there is a lack of approaches that provide a suitable solution to support the interoperability in MDD processes. Moreover, the proposals that define an interoperability framework for MDD processes are still in a theoretical space and are not aligned with current standards, interoperability approaches, and technologies. Thus, the main objective of this doctoral thesis is to develop an approach to achieve the interoperability in MDD processes. This interoperability approach is based on current metamodeling standards, modeling language customization mechanisms, and model-to-model transformation technologies. To achieve this objective, novel approaches have been defined to improve the integration of modeling languages, to obtain a suitable interchange of modeling information, and to perform automatic interoperability verification.Giachetti Herrera, GA. (2011). Supporting Automatic Interoperability in Model-Driven Development Processes [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/11108Palanci

An MDA approach for goal-oriented requirement analysis in Web engineering

Web designers usually ignore how to model real user expectations and goals, mainly due to the large and heterogeneous audience of the Web. This fact leads to websites which are difficult to comprehend by visitors and complex to maintain by designers. In order to ameliorate this scenario, an approach for using the i* modeling framework in Web engineering has been developed in this paper. Furthermore, due to the fact that most of the existing Web engineering approaches do not consider how to derive conceptual models of the Web application from requirements analysis we also propose the use of MDA (Model Driven Architecture) in Web engineering for: (i) the definition of the requirements of a Web application in a Computational Independent Model (CIM), (ii) the description of Platform Independent Models (PIMs), and (iii) the definition of a set of QVT (Query/View/Transformation) transformations for the derivation of PIMs from requirements specification (CIM), thus to enable the automatic generation of Web applications. Finally, we include a sample of our approach in order to show its applicability and we describe a prototype tool as a proof of concept of our research.This work has been partially supported by the MANTRA project (GRE09-17) from the University of Alicante, and by the MESOLAP (TIN2010-14860) from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. José Alfonso Aguilar is subventioned by CONACYT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología) Mexico and University of Sinaloa, Mexico