Forward Engineering Process Research Articles

BXtendDSL: A layered framework for bidirectional model transformations combining a declarative and an imperative language

Model-driven software development (MDSD) heavily relies on model transformations. While in a strict forward engineering process unidirectional transformations are used, bidirectional transformations are crucial as soon as roundtrip engineering comes into play. In this paper, we present a hybrid language specifically designed to describe bidirectional model transformations. From a declarative transformation specification code is generated which uses our framework for bidirectional and incremental model transformations. A sophisticated code generation mechanism allows for hooking into the generated transformation code at the imperative level to supply behavior that cannot be expressed declaratively. A thorough evaluation demonstrates conciseness, expressiveness, and scalability of our approach.

A novel approach for Software Architecture Product Line Engineering

A large software system exists in different forms, as different variants targeting different business needs and users. This kind of systems is provided as a set of “independent” products and not as a “single-whole”. Developers use ad-hoc mechanisms to manage variability. We defend a vision of software development where we consider an SPL architecture starting from which the architecture of each variant can be derived before its implementation. Indeed, each derived variant can have its own life. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for Software Architecture Product Line (SAPL) Engineering. It consists of, i) a generic process for recovering an SAPL model which is a product line of “software architectures” from large-sized variants. ii) a forward-engineering process that uses the recovered SAPL to derive new customized software architecture variants. The approach is firstly experimented on thirteen Eclipse variants to create a new SAPL. Then, an intensive evaluation is conducted using an existing benchmark which is also based on Eclipse IDE. Our results showed that we can accurately reconstruct such an SAPL and derive effectively pertinent variants. Our study provides insights that recovering SAPL and then deriving software architectures offers good documentation to understand the software before changing it.

The Virtual Developer

Model Driven Development (MDD) requires proper tools to derive the implementation code from the application models. However, the integration of handwritten and generated code is a long-standing issue that affects the adoption of MDD in the industry. This article presents a model and code co-evolution approach that addresses such a problem a posteriori , using the standard collision detection capabilities of Version Control Systems to support the semi-automatic merge of the two types of code. We assess the proposed approach by contrasting it with the more traditional template-based, forward-engineering process, adopted by most MDD tools.

Ontology Authoring and Linked Data Generation from Web Applications

One of the fundamental problems in the development of the semantic web is what is known as the ontology authoring. This process allows the domain expert to create ontologies and their instances by dedicated tools from relational databases and/or web applications. In this article is presented an approach that allows building OWL ontologies and RDF instances from web applications. The proposed approach starts with a reverse engineering process that aims to recover the original design from the web application source code by using program understanding techniques. Then, a forward engineering process is applied to create an OWL ontology from the recovered diagrams, based on a set of mapping rules. The proposed approach is concertized by a PHP2OWLGen tool and is evaluated with a set of web applications. The obtained results were encouraging and showed the efficiency of the proposed approach.

The Research on the Software Requirement Development of Information System

Based upon the synopsis of software requirement development, this paper describes the practices of user requirements exploitation, product requirements exploitation, requirements analysis and validation, and then puts forward engineering process relation and requirement development practice. Meanwhile, further works are brought forward. This will benefit the software requirement development of information system.

Transformation of decisional models into UML: application to GRAI grids

Model-driven engineering (MDE) significantly improves the software development process as well as enterprise integration. Based on both modelling and transformation activities it is possible to link models at different levels of abstraction in a classical forward engineering process in order to produce code or, in a reverse engineering process, to produce models from code by a bottom-up approach. But it can also be used to bridge the gap between models belonging to different domains that use different formalisms. This paper therefore focuses mainly on the transformation of decisional models belonging to the Enterprise Modelling domain into UML models used in the Information Technology domain. This kind of transformation is one component of a more general model-driven approach to solve business process interoperability problems or, more widely still, integration problems. More precisely, the paper describes two UML Profile definitions used to transform GRAI Grids into UML Use Case Diagrams or Activity Diagrams. The implementation of these Profiles with the Atlas Transformation Language (ATL) is presented and results are compared and discussed.

DPVK - An Eclipse Plug-in to Detect Design Patterns in Eiffel Systems

Design patterns are not only beneficial to the forward engineering process but also help in design recovery and program understanding, typical reverse engineering activities. In this paper, we introduce DPVK, a reverse engineering tool to detect pattern instances in Eiffel systems. In order to get better detection results, we analyze many different patterns and examine Eiffel software in terms of both static structure and dynamic behaviour. DPVK is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in to ensure better compatibility and extensibility.

Evolution and reuse of orthogonal architecture

We present a case study of evolution (or vertical reuse) in the domain of visual interactive software tools. We introduce an architecture suitable for this purpose, called orthogonal architecture. The paper describes the architecture itself, the reverse engineering process by which it was obtained, and the forward engineering process by which it was evolved.