M.E.R.O.DE.: a model-driven entity-relationship object-oriented Development method

Object Orientation has as primary goal to improve the software construction process. Object Oriented analysis, design and software construction should yield software of a high quality: software that is reliable, maintainable, extensible, adaptable. However, delivering large OO software systems in a qualitative way is a significant challenge. Scaling up requires formal precision of the semantics of the modelling techniques and languages used by the development team. And when the target system contains an abundance of parallelism, the problem of validation becomes unfeasible if it is not supported by formal techniques. With the incorporation of formal techniques in the development process, we can expect significant benefits in terms of software quality.For this reason, one might expect a high level of formality in current OOAD methods [9]. Unfortunately, most current OOAD methods are characterised by a low level of formality. The M.E.R.O.DE. methodology addresses this void. By making use of algebra, the methodology has been provided with a formal basis at several levels with a significant improvement of the quality of the software development process as a result.Before presenting M.E.R.O.DE. to the reader in the second section, the first section motivates the development of still another OOA method. The final section demonstrates how exactly the formal definition of M.E.R.O.DE. results in a gain of quality at the software specification level.