MetaCase announced a new extension for Microsoft Visual Studio. The extension allows users to work with MetaEdit+ models directly from Visual Studio. It also automatically imports source code generated from the MetaEdit+ models into Visual Studio, and builds and runs it there. Unlike other modeling approaches, Domain-Specific Modeling utilizes high-level models which describe things in the terms of a company’s individual problem domain, instead of attempting to visualize the code developers will write. These models directly mirror real-world objects, allowing developers to make better designs with less effort and enabling them ...

Geert Bellekens proposes five rules to draw better Unified Modeling Language diagrams. The best practices discussed in this blog post are to avoid large diagrams with too many items avoid any two lines in your diagram crossing each other lines in a diagram should go only horizontal or vertical with only right angles parent elements are higher then the child elements in generalization or realization hierarchies diagrams should be nice and clean

PragmaDev starts its 2012 on-line survey on software modeling technologies and their usage on its web site. This survey is open to anyone interested by the topic and all participants get a chance to win an iPad. The last few years the number of modeling technologies has dramatically increased, vertically to address different aspects of the development process (SDL, AADL, SysML), as well as horizontally to address different domains (SDL-RT, MARTE, Autosar). Shall the software be considered critical, shall it comply to a standard, or shall it be certified, modeling is ...

The sequence and communications UML diagrams are presented in this short tutorial. A sequence diagram in a Unified Modeling Language (UML) that shows object interactions arranged in time sequence. A Communication diagram models the interactions between objects or parts in terms of sequenced messages. Communication diagrams represent a combination of information taken from Class, Sequence and Use Case diagrams describing both the static structure and dynamic behavior of a system.

This article presents a tool for the reuse of use case diagrams by storing their information in OWL ontology and the use of Semantic Web technologies. Software reuse is defined as the use on a new project of any artifact created before. This practice has significant benefits in reducing costs and increasing quality and productivity in software development. Numerous approaches have been proposed aimed mostly at the source code reuse, but this type of reuse has its limitations because development platforms and technologies are constantly changing. It is necessary to ...

This blog post discusses how and when to use UML use cases in Agile Scrum projects. Use cases are more specific and they describe how your system will act. User stories are focused on the result and the benefit of the thing you’re describing. According to the author use cases shouldn’t be used in Agile software projects unless the team really feel the need for them.

This video explains how you can use tools like the Architecture Explorer to better understand and comprehend complex systems before making any changes to them. You will see how graphically modeling the code makes it easier to understand the impact of a potential change. The video explains also how you can use modeling tools for UML and layer diagramming to describe and communicate the design of a new system—including how these tools can be used to validate the software being developed against its intended architecture. Download video in other formats

Many applications are built around a single data model, typically persisted to a data store via an object-relational mapper (ORM) tool. Sometimes you want to have more flexibility, which requires multiple models. Understanding when one model of data just doesn’t fit all use cases is the challenge for the architect. This article discusses some strategies you can use to handle these situations and develop more layered and robust applications, using objects for data modeling.

ISLANDIA, N.Y., Feb. 1, 2012 – CA Technologies announced new CA ERwin products and releases that help a wider audience of stakeholders accurately visualize data assets across the enterprise, from on-premise platforms to the cloud. Today’s resource-strapped organizations struggle to manage data complexity and share accurate information as new platforms and increasing volumes of data are added to their IT environments. With CA ERwin data modeling tools, business and technical users can reap the benefits of a centralized, common view of business data in context–enabling them to better understand and enforce ...

UML 1.3 has made a pair of changes concerning the use case relationships; one is to move include and extend that used to be stereotypes of the generalization into those of the dependency, and the other is to introduce a true generalization. A use-case generalization, however, is practically useless and therefore the changes are rather worsening the situation. The ACU or “Actors Call Use cases” conjecture, which is actually against the definition of a use case, is found buried in OOSE. It distorts the features of use-case objects and is ...

This article proposes to automate the process of structural and behavior analysis of component-oriented software fully specified in UML. The structural specification uses component, class and deployment diagrams, and the behavior specification, state machine diagram. The produced structural analysis tool analyzes a connection between pairs of components at a time. The produced behavioral analysis tool considers the behavior of the system as a whole, leading to behavioral specification of the application automatically from the machine state of each connected component. It is performed the convertion of the state machines of ...

This article explains how with the application of Agile and Lean principles on model-driven development, we will get an Agile approach for constructing the architecture of a new Market Server Capability (MSC)definition which will eliminate the duplication and inconsistency, while still maintaining a short implementation phase. The resulting architecture has a single modeling level, with merged PIM and PSMs. The model is designed by reverse engineering of the legacy code in a Test Driven Development fashion.

“Just Enough Software Architecture” is book that provides guidelines and models on how to include just enough architecture in your software development activities, following an Agile approach and using risk as the main criteria on how much architecture to include in your current activity. The book uses the Unified Modeling Language (UML) notation. UML is considered as an ubiquitous language and the addition of architectural notation that have been included in UML 2.0 make it visually closer to special purpose architecture languages. Reference:  “Just Enough Software Architecture – A Risk-Driven Approach”, George ...

This blog post presents some improvements of the existing features of Acceleo. Acceleo is a pragmatic implementation of the Object Management Group (OMG) MOF Model to Text Language (MTL) standard. You do not need to be an expert to start using the plug-ins and create your first code generator. One of the improvement is the traceability for each line of code of which part of the generation template generated it, and which model element triggered its generation. This feature is intensively used in the UML to Java generator, an ...

The main reason enterprise system solutions become hard to understand, maintain is that development teams do not apply best practices in a disciplined way when they perform use cases realizations. A use cases realization describes in terms of collaborating objects how a particular use case is realized within the design model. Its goal is to produce a well-structured object-oriented design that implements the behavior defined in the use case. Using object-oriented design means to properly assign responsibilities to objects that compose the system and define the messages that pass among ...

In this small blog post, Kobi Sasson who is the development manager for SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer explains why he thinks that modeling is the next generation of programming languages and presents the different aspects of a good modeling tool: a robust modeling language, a simple modeling tool, user interface extension points, connectivity to various backend and the ability to deliver the applications from development to production or to enable to work on the applications with multiple users.

Agile development often considers UML modeling a redundant tool/practice that needs to be abandonned. However, modeling can be an essential tool in big agile projects to improve communication and preserve high-level knowledge such as domain concepts, user roles and use cases, system composition/integration architecture, etc. Modeling is still immature and novice modelers might create models that directly replicate code details. Agile modeling based on the best practices can help getting more value from simpler models. Although some of these best practices seem to be common sense, many anti-patterns violate them in ...

In this interview, Michael Blaha discusses the relationship between use cases gathering and database modeling. His opinion is that it is fine to capture requirements with use cases, but they should be dependend of the class model, which defines the domain of knolwedge that can be referenced by use cases. For database applications it is much inferior to start with use cases and afterwards construct a class model, because they need a data approach and not a process approach. As object-oriented programming languages define a class structure to which logic ...

With the current release 2.1 the EA Navigator has now matured into a real product that will make the life of any Enterprise Architect user a lot easier.  After the complete re-factoring  of version 2.0 version 2.1 has been more about polishing and refining. The EA Navigator is a free and open-source (BSD License) add-in for Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect that makes the life of any Enterprise Architect user a lot easier. It allows for quick navigation between different elements in a model, especially between those elements that are not easily ...

This video presents several model-driven software development scenarios along with suitable testing approaches, contrasting the roles of MDSD and model-based testing. Watch this video on http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Model-driven-Systems-What-Why-and-How-to-Test