Authors: Bernhard Westfechtel, Simon M. Becker, Thomas Haase
Tags: 2005, conceptual modeling
A-posteriori integration of heterogeneous engineering tools supplied by different vendors constitutes a challenging task. In particular, this statement applies to incremental development processes where small changes have to be propagated – potentially bidirectionally – through a set of inter-dependent design documents which have to be kept consistent with each other. Responding to these challenges, we have developed an approach to tool integration which puts strong emphasis on software architecture and model-driven development. Starting from an abstract description of a software architecture, the architecture is gradually refined down to an implementation level. To integrate heterogeneous engineering tools, wrappers are constructed for abstracting from technical details and for providing homogenized data access. On top of these wrappers, incremental integration tools provide for inter-document consistency. These tools are based on graph models of the respective document classes and graph transformation rules for maintaining inter-document consistency. Altogether, the collection of support tools and the respective infrastructure considerably leverage the problem of composing a tightly integrated development environment from a set of heterogeneous engineering tools.Read the full paper here: http://www.sosym.org/
