A General Framework for the Development of MDD Projects

Beatriz Mar

ın

, Javier Pereira

, Giovanni Giachetti

, Felipe Hermosilla

and Estefan

ıa Serral

Escuela de Ingenier

ıa Inform

atica y Telecomunicaciones, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile

Escuela de Inform

atica, Universidad Andr

es Bello, Santiago, Chile

Christian Doppler Laboratory ”Software Engineering Integration for Flexible Automation Systems”,

Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

Keywords:

Model-driven Development (MDD), General Framework, MDD Tools.

Abstract:

The main characteristic of the Model-Driven Development paradigm is that it allows the automatic (or semi-

automatic) generation of software systems from the conceptual models that specify these systems. The suc-

cessful application of MDD relies in the selection of appropriate diagrams and tools. However, software

engineers do not have frameworks that help them to select the MDD tools that better ﬁt to speciﬁc projects

needs. To face this issue, in this paper we have analysed a set of models and tools that can be used to support

MDD projects. From this analysis, a general framework is presented.

1 INTRODUCTION

The MDD paradigm presents several advantages re-

garding traditional software developments. For in-

stance, MDD reduces the programming effort and

technical complexity involved, software products are

consistent with documentation, etc. These advantages

have motivated the emergence of several modeling

proposals and MDD tools related to different appli-

cation domains and development stages.

One of the key aspects for the successful appli-

cation of MDD relies in the decisions that software

engineers perform at the moment of selecting MDD

approaches and tools. To do this, software engineers

need to take informed decisions about which are the

most suitable tools to use in accordance to speciﬁc sit-

uations. However, at the best of our knowledge, there

not exist a general framework for the selection of ap-

propriate MDD tools depending of the context of the

projects to be developed.

In this paper, we present a general framework that

is centered on the selection and conﬁguration of a spe-

ciﬁc set of diagrams and related MDD tools in order to

support the execution of concrete MDD projects. This

framework is supported by a recommendation system

that helps software engineers in the selection of inter-

esting combinations of MDD tools.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Sec-

tion 2 presents a general MDD framework, and Sec-

tion 4 presents our conclusions and further work.

2 A MDD FRAMEWORK

At the moment of starting an MDD project, software

engineers need to decide the diagrams that will be

used in the software development in accordance to the

application domain. Thus, software engineers must

know what modelling artefacts can be used as CIM,

PIM, PSM, and PM. This is not an easy step due to

different modelling approaches/tools provide differ-

ent facilities to represent the views of the system. For

instance, a class diagram represents the static view,

but it is inappropriate for specifying behavior.

Thus, software engineers must perform a match-

ing among the modelling approaches selected, the

MDA models involved, and the views that are neces-

sary for the proper speciﬁcation of the intended sys-

tem. Later, software engineers select or implement

the tools that support these models in order to carry

out the software development process, and the corre-

sponding model transformations.

All these decisions mainly depend on the experi-

ence and knowledge of software engineers. As conse-

quence, there are powerful MDA tools that may be not

considered in a project development just due to their

lack of knowledge. Also, inexperienced software en-

gineers may not know how to combine the different

diagrams involved. As consequence risky and costly

software developments may be carried out.

To face these problems, we propose a general

framework that combines the MDA models, the di-

257

Marín B., Pereira J., Giachetti G., Hermosilla F. and Serral E..

A General Framework for the Development of MDD Projects.

DOI: 10.5220/0004319402570260

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development (MODELSWARD-2013), pages 257-260

ISBN: 978-989-8565-42-6

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

agrams that can be used as CIM, PIM, PSM or PM,

and the tools that support these models in the domain

of management information systems (MIS).

• The Computation Independent Model. CIM

represents the requirements of a system. In this

model, the UML Use Case diagram and the

UML Activity diagram can be used. Diagrams

oriented to the organizational analysis and

identiﬁcation of business element that will

be supported by the system corresponds to

CIM as well. This is the case of goal oriented

requirements diagrams (Dardenne et al., 1993),

as well as strategic analysis diagrams. For

instance, the i* diagram (Yu, 1995) and the

MAPS diagram (Bennasri et al., 2005) are

examples of these kinds of diagrams.

In addition, diagrams that represent the busi-

ness processes of an organization correspond to

CIM. This is the case of BPMN diagrams, such

us the proposal of (De La Vara et al., 2008).

• The Platform Independent Model. PIM must

have the different views that describe the

system holistically: the static/structural view,

the behavioural/functional view, and the

interaction/presentation view.

For the static/structural view, the UML Class

diagram, the UML object diagram, and the ER

diagram (Chen, 1976) can be used. For the be-

havioural/functional view, the UML State Ma-

chine, the UML Sequence, and the UML Col-

laboration diagrams can be used.

For the interaction/presentation view, we postu-

late that the OO-Method presentation diagram

(Pastor and Molina, 2007), and WebML Hy-

pertext diagram (Moreno et al., 2007) can be

used. At this point, it is important to men-

tion that in contrast to the structural and the be-

havioural view, only few proposals for the in-

teraction view are found in literature.

• The Platform Speciﬁc Model The PSM adds

some implementation details to PIM. Thus, the

UML component, the UML package, and the

UML deployment diagrams can be used.

• The Platform Model The PM corresponds to the

ﬁnal code of the system. This model will

change depending on the technologies available

in a speciﬁc domain. For instance, for the MIS

domain, the PSM can be codiﬁed using ASP,

PHP, J2EE, .NET, Oracle, SQL, etc. For other

domains, different platforms can be used.

From the matching of diagrams and MDA models,

a general MDD framework related to the information

systems domain (see Figure 1) has been deﬁned.

In Figure 1, dashed lines represent optional di-

agrams and optional transformations. For instance,

sometimes it is necessary to specify analysis diagrams

(such as i*) to properly identify the functional and

non-functional requirements of the system. Later,

these analysis models are transformed into the cor-

responding design artefacts (system views), such as

class diagrams (e.g. the proposal of (GIACHETTI

et al., 2010)), or even other analysis diagrams. Later,

the CIM model must be transformed to a system

model (PIM). Nevertheless, expert software engineers

could decide to go directly to the speciﬁcation of PIM

models without using CIM models.

In the PIM model, it is necessary (at least) that

software engineers select a diagram that represents

the structural/static view, a diagram that represents the

behavioural/functional view, and a diagram that rep-

resents the interaction/presentation view. In Figure 1,

this situation is represented by rectangles with contin-

uous lines. However, the diagrams that are located in-

side of the rectangles are interchangeable each other.

In the MIS domain, the structural diagram is the core

diagram of a system. The rest of system views are

described from this diagram by using behavioural dia-

grams and interaction diagrams. Thus, we have drawn

a dashed line from the diagrams of the structural view

to the remaining views of the PIM model.

Then, PIM model must be transformed to the cor-

responding PSM model. Nevertheless, some tools go

directly from the PIM to the PM. The PSM model is

internally generated by the model compilation tools

in an automatic and transparent manner.

Finally, the platform speciﬁc model (PSM) is

transformed into the platform model (PM). In the gen-

eral MDD framework, we speciﬁed the PM as a 3-tier

architecture because it is commonly used for manag-

ment information systems. This architechture is com-

posed by a presentation tier, an application logic tier,

and a database tier. In Figure 1, a list of massive tech-

nologies has been located in each rectangle of the PM.

This general MDD framework is a starting point

for the development of an MDD project. Thus, other

diagrams, technologies, and transformations can be

added to the framework depending on the speciﬁc

needs of a project.

2.1 Matching MDA Tools and the

General MDD Framework

Once software engineers have decided the diagrams

that they will use in the speciﬁcation of the MDD

project, is time to select the tools that support these

diagrams and the necessary transformations. A list of

57 tools and the respective companies was collected

MODELSWARD2013-InternationalConferenceonModel-DrivenEngineeringandSoftwareDevelopment

258

CIM

PIM

PSM

I*'Diagram,

MAPS'Diagram

BP'Diagram

Use'Case'

Diagram,

Activity Diagram

Object Diagram

Class Diagram

E=R'Diagram

State Transition

Diagram

Sequence Diagram

Collaboration

Diagram

Functional Model

OO=Method

Presentation

Model

WebML Diagram

Component

Diagram

Package Diagram

Deployment

Diagram

ASP

JSP

PHP'

J2EE

.NET

SQL

ORACLE

MySQL

GENERAL'MDD'FRAMEWORK

Figure 1: A general MDD framework.

from the ofﬁcial OMG website and last updated in

march 9th of 2012. This list of tools was analyzed ac-

cording to the application domain, the diagrams sup-

ported for CIM, PIM and PSM, and the model com-

pilation facilities provided for PM generation.

From this analysis, there are 35/57 tools related to

the MIS domain. It is important to mention that most

of the tools analysed (20/35) do not specify the dia-

grams supported for the deﬁnition of CIM, PIM, or

PSM models; they only specify that UML diagrams

are supported. In this case, the MDA tools involved

correspond to pure model-compilation tools, which

provide importation facilities (through XML/XMI

ﬁles) from different UML modelling tools.

In addition, there is no one tool provides support

to all the models deﬁned by MDA (CIM, PIM, PSM,

and PM). Thus, in a MDD project it is necessary to

combine two or more tools for achieving a complete

MDA process. This is not an easy task since tools se-

lection must be oriented to cover all (or most of) the

modelling and code generation needs, which are rep-

resented in terms of speciﬁc requirements for concrete

development processes.

2.2 Appliying a Multicriteria Decision

Framework

Let us consider that it is necessary to develop a confer-

ence system that automates the following tasks: send

a paper, asign reviewers, review the paper, and send

notiﬁcations to authors. To develop the conference

system in an MDD project, software engineers have

identiﬁed the necessity to specify a BPMN diagram

to understand the whole set of processes involved in

the submission task of a paper for a conference. This

speciﬁcation will correspond to the CIM model.

Then, software engineers need to specify the PIM

model. Let us consider that software engineers have

some experience using the class and the state transi-

tion diagrams. Thus, the PIM model will consist of

a these diagrams and an interaction diagram. Finally,

let us consider that the conference system must be im-

plemented using the java platform.

Then, we apply a Multicriteria Decision Frame-

work in order to select a minimal set of tools that

cover these requirements for the conference system.

Figure 2 shows a subset of 24 tools extracted from

the list of tools analyzed from the OMG, and the ﬁve

requirements suggested above. Different algorithms

may be applied to solve this problem. However, sim-

ulations show that an algorithm proposed in (Paredes

and Pereira, 2010) is enough to identify the four non-

dominated tool-sets: 1) Integranova Model Execution

System, M-1 Global; 2) Integranova Model Execu-

tion System, Blu-Age; 3) ModelioSoft, MasterCraft;

4) Rational Software Architect, MasterCraft.

Notice that some tools appear in several solutions.

We could argue that these are robust tools in the sense

that they persistently take part of solutions. Although

robustness analysis is beyond the scope of the present

paper, it is important to remark that some kind of ex

post analysis need to be afforded by software engi-

neers in order to validate the recommended solutions.

3 RELATED WORK

In the work presented by (Mansell et al., 2006), an

MDD process framework is deﬁned as a repository

of speciﬁc MDD processes, which have proven to

be successful in the industry and deﬁnes four differ-

ent models that go from a higher to a lower abstrac-

AGeneralFrameworkfortheDevelopmentofMDDProjects

259

CIM

CIM PM

BPMN

Class Diagram

State Machine Diagram

GUI

Java

BPMN

Class Diagram

State Machine Diagram

GUI

Java

@-portunity (Blueprint Software Modeler) 0 1 1 0 1 Model-In-Action (Mia Studio) 0 0 0 0 1

Aonix (Ameos) 0 0 0 0 1 MID (innovator) 1 1 1 0 0

BitPlan(smartGenerator) 0 0 0 0 1 Netfective (BlueAge) 1 0 0 0 0

Borland (Borland Together) 1 1 0 0 1 Outline Systems Inc (Power Rad) 0 0 0 0 1

Codagen Technologies (Codagen Architect) 0 0 0 0 1 Pathfinder Solutions (PathMate) 0 0 0 0 1

Codeless 0 1 1 1 0 Plastic Software (Agora Plastic) 0 0 0 0 1

EdCubed 1 1 0 0 0 Softaris Pty (MetaBoss) 1 0 1 0 0

Gentastic (e-Gen) 0 1 0 0 0 SoftTeam (ModelioSoft) 1 1 1 0 1

M-1 Global 1 0 0 0 0

CARE Technologies (Integranova Model

Execution System)

0 1 1 1 1

IBM (Rational software architect) 1 1 1 0 1 Sparx Systems (Enterprise Architect) 1 1 0 0 1

Interactive Object's Software (ArcStyler) 0 1 0 0 0 Tata Consultancy Services (MasterCraft) 0 0 0 1 0

Liantis (XCoder) 0 0 0 0 1 TechOne (Ace) 0 0 0 0 1

Company (tool)

PIM

Company (tool)

PIM

Figure 2: Example of application.

tion level. Apto (Jaroucheh et al., 2010) is an MDD

framework that takes into account the evolution of the

software development processes. This framework is

organized in four models: a process model, a con-

text model, an evolution model, and a linkage model.

These frameworks do not specify what are the dia-

grams needed to specify a system and how they can

be combined at the MIS domain. Moreover, related

works do not provide concrete references to the tools

that can be used in a speciﬁc project.

4 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, a general MDD framework has been

presented. This framework characterizes the dia-

grams and tools that can be used in a MDA-based

process, thus reducing barriers between senior and

novice software engineers at the moment of putting

MDD projects into practice. This framework is gen-

eral, therefore, it is possible to add other MDD tools

with the diagrams that they support.

A multicriteria decision system has been applied

to an example of the use of the MDD framework. This

application allows the selection of the minimum set

of tools that satisfy the modeling needs of a speciﬁc

MDD project, which main advantage is the reduction

in the learning curve (less tools to be learned). Also, it

reduces the effort related to the implementation of in-

teroperability mechanisms among the different tools

selected. The future work plan to perform empirical

studies to validate the framework.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was funded by the TESTMODE FONDE-

CYT Project Ref. 11121395.

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