in Michael P. Papazoglou (ed.): OOER'95: Object-Oriented and Entity Relationship Modelling; Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1021, pages 1-20; Proceedings, ER-OO conference, Brisbane Australia, December 1995; Paper (ps)
In this paper we report on work and direction in the use of modern software architectures and formal models to address issues of software maintenance. Related and earlier work has addressed the automatic creation of object structures for customer applications using these models and their algebra, and we will summarize that work. The focus here on maintenance is to attack the most costly and frustrating aspect in dealing with large-scale software systems: keeping them up-to-date and responsive to user needs and changing environments.
We introduce the concept of domain-specific models to partition the maintenance effort. A conservative algebra is defined for interoperation among these models is sketched. These models are the basis for mediators, autonomous modules to create information objects out of source data. These modules establish an intermediate layer, bridging clients an servers. This mediated architecture can reduce the cost growth of maintenance to a near-linear function of system size, whereas current system architectures have quadratic factors.
The models provide also a means for the maintainer to share knowledge with the customer. The customer can become involved in the maintenance of their task models, without having to be familiar with the details of all the resources that are becoming available on our networks. In the presentation we will provide more background on the functionality of mediators, but these will only be touched and referenced within this paper. Maintenance is the focus here.