Concurrent Engineering & Tool Integration
The number of documents, models, and tools in software development increases with the number and complexity of software development processes. Because data in different tools and documents depends on one another, keeping this data consistent has become an important and demanding challenge. Therefore, considerable efforts are spent on the development of integration and transformation tools.
Our research in this area aims at systematic and efficient development of such tools. As the figure below depicts, we combine metamodeling and model transformation techniques to development integration environments efficiently.
In our integration approach, the structure of tool data is described in metamodels. Parsers or tool adapters can be used to import tool data into repositories that are generated from such metamodels. These repositories provide interfaces that are appropriate for our synchronization mechanisms. From declarative integration rules in Triple Graph Grammars or QVT, it is possible to generate operational transformation rules that can be applied by a synchronization framework.