Software Model Engineering and Reuse with the Evolution and Validation Environment

Abstract

Reuse in software construction has been a core aspect of software engineering since the term was coined in late 70’s [2]. Strategies for reuse like high level languages, structuring and encapsulation have made valuable contributions. Today, the software industry produces components as reusable parts, which deliver advantages like faster time-to-market, cost reduction, better maintainability, configurability etc. While the reuse of code and components improves, one important contributing factor of the engineering process remains out of scope: Although design reuse is more effective and beneficial than code reuse [1] models of software systems still are not assets of the software process. As a result design reuse does not impact the actual software engineering process. The impediments and successes of bringing models to the heart of the software process are reflected in the history of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We will retell this story below to pick up the motivation for our own project, the Evolution and Validation Environment (EVE), which has the potential to globally reuse and share know-how expressed in models and model services, independent of and complementary to existing modeling tools. We give an overview of EVE’s architecture and present an example of its application. Finally, we delve into the details of an EVE core component, the OCL profile validator service (MOCL), which is used to check UML models for compliance with profiles.