Model driven software development and evolution

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Large software applications are designed and developed in distinct phases. These phases pertain to specifying the requirements and the business objectives, designing the system, implementing the source program, testing the individual components and the application as a whole and finally, deploying the system. In the software engineering literature we consider that once software systems are deployed on a site then they enter a new phase which is referred to as, the maintenance phase. In this respect, designing a new system pertains to forward engineering while understanding and maintaining existing systems pertains to reverse engineering and evolution. Traditionally, forward engineering and application evolution were considered as two distinct areas of software engineering research that share very limited, if any, common models, processes, techniques, and tools. It is only recently that the research community and the software engineering practitioners view software development as an iterative and incremental process, where models and artifacts are slowly and incrementally designed, developed and, refined until the full application is completed. Such approaches consider that software development should take the form of consistent, systematic and incremental understanding, manipulation, transformation, evolution, and synchronization of software models. These models co-exist in specialized tools called Integrated Development Environments or IDEs. In this context, the objective of the proposed research is to investigate, design, and implement novel techniques to support the representation, transformation, and synchronization of software models in order to facilitate the semi-automatic, iterative and, incremental design, development and, evolution of large industrial systems. To date, there is only limited research on generalizing such model transformation frameworks that can be used to support the next generation of Integrated Development Environments. This research is expected to provide insights on how to design the next generation Integrated Software Development Environments.