Heterogeneous view integration and its automation

Software systems are characterized by unprecedented complexity. One effective means of dealing with that complexity is to consider a system from a particular perspective, or view (e.g., architecture or design diagram). Views enable software developers to reduce the amount of information they have to deal with at any given time. They enable this by utilizing a divide-and-conquer strategy that allows large-scale software development problems to be broken up into smaller, more comprehensible pieces. Individual development issues can then be evaluated without the need of access to the whole body of knowledge about a given software system. The major drawback of views is that development concerns cannot truly be investigated by themselves, since concerns tend to affect one another. Successful and precise product development supported via multiple views requires that common assumptions and definitions are recognized and maintained in a consistent fashion. In other words, having views with inconsistent assumptions about a system's expected environment reduces their usefulness and possibly renders invalid solutions based on them. Developing software systems therefore requires more than what general-purpose software development models can provide today. Development is about modeling, solving, and interpreting, and in doing so a major emphasis is placed on mismatch identification and reconciliation within and among diagrammatic and textual views. Our work introduces a view integration framework and demonstrates how its activities enable view comparison in a more scalable and reliable fashion. Our framework extends the comparison activity with mapping and transformation to define the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of view integration. We will demonstrate the use of our framework on the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which has become a de-facto standard for object-oriented software development. In this context we will describe causes of model inconsistencies among UML views, and show how integration techniques can be applied to identify and resolve them in a more automated fashion. Our framework is tool supported.