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Abstract
Model-driven software development has gained increasing importance within SAP, especially with the introduction of its enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Yet, its potential of increasing the overall development productivity without compromising overall product quality has not fully be achieved. MOST will improve software engineering by leveraging ontology and reasoning technology and provide a seamless integration of ontology technology into modeldriven software development (MDSD). Using the MOST approach to formalize the software development process, software engineers will be freed from performing time-consuming, yet unnecessary, process-related tasks.
Mission
The MOST artefact integration technology will allow for managing software development and ontology-based validation and knowledge management in an integrated platform. In order to achieve this:
- The integration will address modelling languages. A unified view of metamodels must be provided to be able to query and transform integrated models.
- Ontologies and models will be integrated so that ontologies can be used in models, and vice versa. MOST will enable integrated model chains, transforma tions between models either consisting of ontologies or system models.
- Ontology-based queries will be integrated on the level of MDA transformations. Querying will
support the developer to fulfill requirements and address modelling decisions.
WP6 will provide case studies in the Enterprise Application domain that follow a model-driven approach, but which still contain a significant number of manual tasks and activities. The goal is to apply methodologies and technologies developed in MOST to improve the productivity of developers (and/or architects), inside and outside SAP, by providing efficient guidance in their respective tool suites. The case studies provide a test bed for showing the usability, and possible limitations of the family of logic languages developed in this project.
Use Scenarios
SAP’s development teams make extensive use of model-driven approaches, which have shown to improve efficiency and effectiveness. SAP will evaluate the concepts and technologies of MOST in two case studies:
- The first case study is primarily concerned with testing the Guidance of the Software Development Process, while ex-ploiting reasoning and traceability capabilities.
- The second case study considers Guidance in the Solution Domain, i.e., support in transforming non-technical constraints from the problem domain into recommendations during model-driven development activities.
Details of case studies
Moving on to enterprise SOA, SAP has further consolidated its tool landscape and is currently building the platform for its next generation modelling tools. This platform, called MOIN (MOdeling INfrastructure), is a MOF-based environment designed to support large, industry-scale, MDA scenarios. Furthermore, consolidation has also happened at the conceptual level using thesauri and taxonomies which can be exploited in MOST as a starting point for building case study related ontologies. SAP will evaluate the concepts and technologies developed in MOST based on conceptual sources and the existing tool landscape.
Guidance of the Software Development Process
In order to improve guidance of a software development process, SAP’s software development processes and tools will be scrutinized and the various roles (e.g., developer, architect, business analyst, etc.) responsible for the different process refinement steps will be modeled in a guidance ontology to, e.g., improve consistency of the development environment by maintaining and reasoning with the dependencies of required components and tasks. Furthermore, this case study will apply the traceability technology developed in WP4 throughout the whole so-ware development process, to care for a proper visualization of dependencies.
Guidance in the Solution Domain
Transformation of non-technical constraints from the problem domain into recommendations during model-driven development activities will be investigated within the Guidance in the Solution Domain Study. These non-technical constraints typically capture, for example, requirements from the legal domain which ultimately have to be supported and enforced by the technical solution. Although MDA provides means to capture constraints, too, these constraints are limited to the structural properties of the technical models, i.e., they can only validate properties that are explicitly captured in these technical models. In contrast to that, the non-technical constraints typically affect several technical artefacts and their dependencies that stem from these non-technical constraints cannot be easily captured in the technical models. Thus, we want to deploy technology developed in MOST to express non-technical, business-related constraints in ontology, and use these rules to guide sub-sequent development activities. Furthermore, the traceability technologies of WP4 will be used to ensure the links back from the technical artefacts to the constraints to allow faster adoption in case of changing requirements.
Results of both case studies made in WP6 will impact the ongoing development as the first demonstrator will provide a feedback to the conceptual and technological WPs.