Concern-based (de)composition of Model-Driven Software Development Processes

2010 research paper

In Proc. of ACM/IEEE 13th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MoDELS’10), volume 6395 of LNCS, Springer
with: Uwe Aßmann

An MDSD process is often organised as transformation chain. This can threaten the Separation of Concerns (SoC) principle, because information is replicated in, scattered over, and tangled in different models. Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) supports SoC to avoid such scatterings and tangling of information. Although there are integrations of MDSD and AOSD, there is no approach that uses concern separation for all artifacts (documents, models, code) involved in an MDSD process as the primary (de)composition method for the complete process. In this paper, we propose such an approach called ModelSoC. It extends the hyperspace model for multi-dimensional SoC to deal with information that is replicated in different models. We present a ModelSoC implementation based on our Reuseware framework that organises all information provided in arbitrary models during development in a concern space and composes integrated views as well as the final system from that. This is shown on the development of a demonstrator system.