A meta-model for method integration

Abstract

Software development methods, sometimes called methodologies, have been widely embraced and practiced due to the quality of the systems achieved using such systematic approaches. However, the need to develop more and more complex systems is stretching the individual methods beyond their limits. It is therefore believed that an approach employing multiple methods would be a more effective way to tackle the current software development method crisis. This paper presents an approach to integrate multiple methods through the use of a meta-model. The contribution of the approach lies in two aspects. The first is the use of semantic equivalence between method components to establish an uniformity between individual methods. Such an uniformity reduces the complexity associated with method integration. The second is the incorporation of procedural information, namely tasks and their order, into the meta-model. The meta-model does not, however, compromise the expressive power provided by individual methods since method-specific information is also captured. The effectiveness of the approach has been successfully demonstrated using a CASE tool developed using the meta-model to integrate object diagrams, state transition diagrams and data flow diagrams.