A Product Specification Database for Visual Prototyping

We propose a product specification database which is suited to product evolution, modeling the product specification as an object. In this database, we propose a behavioral constraint to maintain consistency. Furthermore, this database can manage visual specification, such as operational specification, which is hard to handle in an ordinary database. We have been developing Visual CASE: an object-oriented software development system for home appliances. Visual CASE is a visual prototyping system based on the object model we propose. In this paper, we show that the product specification is easy to examine, using visual prototyping. We also discuss implementation issues of the database applied to the home appliance software development process. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this mate&l is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, OT to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings’of the 21st VLDB Conference Ziirich, Switzerland, 1995