Viewpoint-Driven Problem Frames Approach And Its Tool Support

The development activity of today’s large and complex software system is invariably and deeply embedded in large-scare problem context and involves various kinds of stakeholders who have different perspectives or viewpoints on the problem they are addressing, meanwhile, they often use these perspectives or viewpoints as the evaluation criterion for the future system. Thus, it is vital to explicitly express and analyze these viewpoints, their relationships, the partial problem context that these viewpoints concern, and then integrate them into a complete and consistent form to get an overall understanding of the problem at hand, which can also facilitate further overall architectural design and development. Therefore, it is essential to do research and develop a requirement modeling method and associate process model that is viewpoint-based and can structure the problem context.We have chosen to focus on viewpoint-based technique and the Problem Frames Approach (PF), from a large variety of requirements modeling techniques, for the purpose of fully exploit system related requirement source, modeling the internal and external relationship of different viewpoint in a vivid and structural way.Conceptually, viewpoint-based techniques emphasize early elicitation and analysis of requirements from their sources, i.e., various kinds of system stakeholders; The Problem Frames approach focus on structuring the requirement, the problem context, the machine domain and their physical and logical relationships. The former is suitable for the discovery of requirements at their sources, while the later can generate concrete models of requirements and relevant application domains. In the PF approach, by compositing sub-problems, we can construct the entire problem model. We develop an approach integrating viewpoint-based method and the Problem Frames approach, due to the multiple perspectives on software development provided by viewpoints, and the concrete and visual models provided by PF. In this paper, we propose a viewpoint-driven problem frames approach, and then based on this approach, we provide a viewpoint-driven problem modeling process so as to provide a practical method of capturing and expressing the requirements of different system stakeholders and the problem context they concern. By using theVPF approach, we can construct viewpoint-based subproblem diagrams. We get the entire problem diagram by analyzing and composing a large number of sub-problems, which is helps to ensure the completeness and consistency in requirements elicitation and the system architecture design.In this dissertation, we first propose the VPF modeling technique and associatedprocess, and then carry out a case study on a suppermarket. In order to get feedback in a realistic and practical setting, and get hint for further improvement of our approach, we develop some tool support, which is based on the techniques of Xtext, GMF, Acceleo, Java. We build several plugins and integrate them into the open-source project’OpenPF’to achieve viewpoint intergration and produce pseudocode from viewpoint-based sub-problems, so as to guide later development activities. Finally, in order to lower the level of abstraction of problem model and gain more detailed domain knowledge, we design a meta-model which supports finer granularity of knowledge modeling and reasoning.