Operational Pattern Based Code Generation For Domain-Specific Management Information System

Software reuse enables software engineers to reduce or avoid repeated workload in software development.It is also a remarkable method to substantially increase productivity and quality,reduce costs and shorten development cycle.There are two kinds of software reuse,product reuse and process reuse.Process reuse reuses existing software resources to automatically or semi-automatically generate expected system,and thus is a more effective reuse technology.However,due to limited financial and human resources in most of small and medium software enterprises,the performance of code generation is not satisfactory.This paper firstly analyzes challenges when small and medium software enterprises leverage code generation,and chooses domain specific management information systems as the research subject.An approach named operational pattern based code generation(OPCG)is proposed,using model-driven software development,software product line engineering,and natural language processing technologies.And then a corresponding code generation tool is developed subsequently.Application developers can configure the tool for new system requirements,and immediately get the generated application skeleton code,which results in the improvement on software productivity and software quality.The OPCG approach consists of domain engineering phase and application engineering phase.The former phase uses domain analysis methods to identify commonality and variability,then extracts and reconstructs components as well as architecture to build a domain component library and a reference architecture template respectively.Feature models of operational patterns are built and metadata of configuration are also defined in this phase.The later phase allows developers to choose operational patterns and customize configuration referring to new software requirements,and quickly obtain generated code through text-template based code generation.Two key technologies of OPCG are researched in details:(1)Extraction and modeling of operational pattern.This paper semi-automatically extracts operational patterns by using rule-based dependency parsing,visually represents the commonality and variability of each operational pattern by using feature models,and defines concrete configuration metadata from operations,data and user interface aspects.(2)Code generation based on template.This paper creates templates in template language,according to domain models and reference architecture code,makes and validates XML configuration file with configuration metadata.Components are standardized from implementation and specification.Skeleton code is generated by achieving rules,which convert data models as well as templates to code.Finally,an exploratory case study is carried out for verifying feasibility and effectiveness of the OPCG approach.Asset management information system is chosen as the specific domain and then analyzed using domain engineering.Two new applications are developed with the OPCG approach.Experimental data show that the OPCG approach can improve both development productivity and software quality,without any adverse effect on maintenance ratio.The approach can also effectively reduce repeated coding by generating more than half of the application code.