From Formal Semantics to Executable Models: A Pragmatic Approach to Model-Driven Development

With respect to contents, Software Engineering deals with the mutual combination of formalisms, methods, and tools that are integrated by a common theoretical basis, as well as applications that use all these aspects. The model-driven development (MDD) of software is a typical instance of this view, as it exhibits all the facets mentioned above. In this paper, we identify some major unsolved problems of MDD concerning the contemplated areas and postulate a pragmatically motivated couple of hypotheses defining our constraints for solving these problems. Our particular view of MDD uses the Unified Modeling Language (UML) which we substantiate by defining a formal semantics for wide parts of it. On this basis, we suggest a process which incorporates model elaboration combined with aspects of quality assurance. Prototypical tools to support our approach are presented and their applicability is shown by means of two examples.

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