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Summary continuous quality assurance of implemented architecture models
Categories design , process , testing , analysis
License Apache License, Version 2.0
Owner(s) Jan Hinzmann
Sourceforge site http://sourceforge.net/projects/jmd/

Project description

jMoDi is the choosen name of this project. It is an abbreviation of the term Mo del Di fferences which evolve during software development. The j at the beginning is just paying attention to the fact that MoDi sit written in Java and the fact that the project name modi was already taken here at sourceforge.
In addition to this jmd is an abbreviation of jMoDi.

So how do Model Differences evolve? Lets have a look at the following picture illustrating the genesis of MoDis:

In words:
  1. An software architect develops an Architecture Model (AM) of a software.
  2. This AM is forwarded along with some communication in one or more meetings to a team of developers. The AM is now called DM. During the communication on something complex like software it quite sure that misunderstandings will occur.
  3. The developers wil transfer the DM to an implementation using their skills of software engineering. Again differences between the intention of the architect and actual code are quite sure to occur.
  4. Using a tool to discover differences between the origin (AM) and the actual implementation (IC) helps us to stay close to requierments and therefore closer to keep the customer satisfieed.

Motivation

During the ongoing development of software the implementation drifts away from the initial design due to the changing requirements (known as moving targets), lack of communication and unforeseen difficulties.

This drift is unacceptable as the design represents the common picture and is the basis for further development and maintenance of the software, and should therefore only be changed after communication took place which updates this common picture. Automating continuous comparison of design and implementation (resulting in model differences) during the development phase increases the quality of a software project. Checking continuously for model differences and propagating them appropriately will increase the communication between the roles engaged in software projects leading to less misunderstandings and decreasing the amount of failed software projects. Our approach detects differences between architecture and implementation in a non-invasive manner. It initiates communication between architects and engineers so that both the implementation and the architectural artefact keep upto- date.

Mission

The goal of this project is to provide a tool for minimizing the gap between design and implementation in software projects. The tool therefore compares two codebases (the architects model and the developers model) and finds the differences between these two models.

What is the scope of this project?

  • continuous quality assurance
  • finding differences between design and implementation

What are high-level features you are sure to build?

  • a tool for detecting differences between the design and an implementation.
  • a Maven2 plugin to integrate MoDi into your continuous integration
  • svn hook scripts to update a model differences report site

What are the high-level assumptions or ground rules for the project?

  • We use the Java programming language.
  • We use ANTLR for transforming a codebase into an intern model
  • We use Maven 2 for this project.

Example

Think of the following example (Interface Oriented Design, Ken Pugh, 2006 ):

You are designing a software for a pizza service. Maybe you end up in a first draft with the following design:



This UML model could be transformed into the following peace of code:



After this first design of the software, this specificaion is passed to the developer team. The team then implements the intefaces. The developers add an implementation class to the model. They also find out that the method setAddress is not necessary as it can be obtained from the ICaller object. So they remove it from the model. However, the team not only implemented the design but they introduced model differences. These model differences should be communicated to the architect. So that she is aware of this news.

Using MoDi to discover the differences described above leads us to a report shown here:


There is a HTML version of this report here .

Related resources

Here you find a list of related resources: