The Research Of The Development Method For A Modeling Tool

All existing software development methods have some advantages and weak points, none of them can fit all software development environment. So in special field and environment, man should select the fit process and principle of software development methods agilely to improve the quality and efficiency of the development work. DMMT (Development Method of Modeling Tools) is a software development method put forward during the development of a modeling tool. Through the research and analysis for common used software engineering methods such as software life cycle, prototyping model, structured method, and object-oriented method, the main characteristics, advantages and weak points of them can be found out, which can be used as reference for the occurrence of DMMT method and also be useful for developing work. Unified Modeling Language(UML) has been a primary modeling technology based on object-oriented development method, and been adopted by DMMT as a primary modeling method. But what UML has done is just unifying symbols and signs of different development methods, and software development process is not suggested. Unified Process(UP) and Extreme Programming(XP) are popular software processes nowadays which are used as reference for DMMT method. UP has strict phase division and workflow definition, but XP is not so strict, which has more advantage on the development of small-scale projects. So UP and XP can be combined together if the practice activities of XP are mapped to the workflows of UP, and the combination can be useful to the research work of DMMT. DMMT method has combined many research work of software development methods, modeling, development processes richly and been a software development method that possesses such characteristics as: base on object-oriented method, applying UML as primary modeling technology, use-case driven, architecture-centric, many development methods combinative, iterative and incremental process. It divides software development into four phases which include several iterations of the six workflows. Though DMMT method is derived from development work of a modeling tool, it can be as a reference for other software development which has the similar scale as the modeling tool.