Abstract. Co-operative development of distributed software systems involves to address the multiple perspectives problem: many stakeholders with diverse domain knowledge and differing development strategies collaborate to construct heterogeneous developmen

ViewPoint-oriented Software Development: ToolSupport for Integrating Multiple Perspectives by

Distributed Graph Transformation

Michael Goedicke1, Bettina Enders1, Torsten Meyer1 and Gabriele Taentzer2 Specification of Software Systems, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science,

University of Essen, Germany

{goedicke, enders, tmeyer}@informatik.uni-essen.de

2 Theoretical Computer Science / Formal Specification Group, Department of Computing,

Technical University of Berlin, Germany

gabi@cs.tu-berlin.de1

Abstract. Co-operative development of distributed software systems involvesto address the multiple perspectives problem: many stakeholders with diversedomain knowledge and differing development strategies collaborate to con-struct heterogeneous development artifacts using different representationschemes. The ViewPoints framework has been developed for organizing multi-ple stakeholders, the development processes and notations they use, and thepartial specifications they produce. In this contribution we present a tool envi-ronment supporting ViewPoint-oriented software development based on a for-malization by distributed graph transformation.

Introduction and Related Work

In system design the various development stages are visited more than once and quitedifferent notations and process models need to be integrated in order to satisfy therequirements of the different stakeholders’ views and their processes. It is thereforehighly desirable to provide flexible conceptual means and related tool support forrepresenting the various cooperating stakeholders’ views and process models. In thiscontribution we use the ViewPoints framework to represent such views and proc-esses. In addition the ViewPoints framework involves to tolerate inconsistent infor-mation in related ViewPoints until it seems necessary or appropriate to check and(re)establish consistency -- at least in some parts of the system [1]. The ViewPointsframework has been used quite successfully and has been documented in the literature

[2, 1, 4].

The question which is addressed here is how tool support can be constructed to ef-fectively represent the loosely coupled approach: some local development within aViewPoint is followed by interaction with related ViewPoints via consistency checks.The approach of distributed graph transformation supports the idea of loosely cou-pled ViewPoints as outlined above quite naturally. It realizes the separation between