A method and software engineering environment for configuring applications from reusable specifications and architectures

At the Center for Software Systems Engineering in George Mason University, a project is underway to support software engineering life cycles, methods, and environments for families of systems. The goal is to support reuse at major phases of software life cycle: requirements, design, and implementation. It is in this context that the Evolutionary Domain Life Cycle (EDLC) model, the software life cycle for a family of systems, was proposed.;The EDLC model previously supported only domain analysis & modeling and target system specification generation. The current research extends EDLC to support architectural design and implementation. This research also supports the target system architecture generation and configuration of executable target system applications from a domain architecture stored in the reuse library.;More specifically this research presents a method, which maps a domain model to a domain architecture, which is then developed as a collection of reusable components. The domain information is stored in a domain reuse library. This information is then made available to a target system engineer, who can select the features to be included in a target system, resulting in specification for that target system. These target system specifications are mapped to an equivalent target system architecture, and the reusable components supporting that architecture are extracted from the domain reuse library and configured into an executable application.;A proof-of-concept software engineering environment is also developed which demonstrates the concepts of the enhanced Evolutionary Domain Life Cycle model. The proof-of-concept environment supports the domain analysis and specification, domain architecture design, and domain implementation during the domain engineering phase of the EDLC model. The environment also supports target system specification generation, target system architecture generation, and target system configuration during the target system generation phase of the EDLC model. The method and the environment are domain independent, and have been applied to two different application domains: factory automation domain and federation interface manager domain.