Object CASE : a design tool for object-oriented development

Abstract

The growing need for the development of larger and more complex software systems in a dynamic and competitive environment has resulted in new approaches and techniques being applied in the software development process. As new approaches for modeling the problem domain are found, and new development paradigms begin to gain widespread acceptance, new tools must be found to support the software engineer in the face of the changes. The problem of developing appropriate tools to cope with modern software practice continues to attract increasing interest within the software engineering research community. One approach that has recently received a lot of attention is the object-oriented development paradigm. Being a relatively new approach, many interesting issues exist that have as yet not received adequate research attention. This thesis addresses two of these issues: graphical notations for the design and browsing of large systems. First it addresses the problem of providing support for interactive graphical construction of class interfaces and libraries in the specification and design phases of large object-oriented software systems. Next it explores suitable graphical methods for browsing through existing object-oriented systems, with a view to making it easier for systems written by one team to be more readily understood by another. The context of the latter is to provide support for maintenance and re-engineering. Show more