General Object-oriented Database for Software Engineering Processes

The goal of the GOODSTEP project is to enhance and improve the functionality of a fully object-oriented database management system to yield a platform suited for applications such as Software Development Environments SDEs. The baseline of the project is the O 2 database management system DBMS. The O 2 DBMS already includes many of the features required by SDEs. The project has identifed enhancements to O 2 in order to make it a real software engineering database management system. These enhancements are essentially upgrades of the existing O 2 functionality, and hence require r elatively easy extensions to the O 2 system. They have been developed i n t h e early stages of the project and are now exploited and validated by a number of software engineering tools built on top of the enhanced O 2 database system. To e ase tool construction , the GOODSTEP platform encompasses tool generation capabilities which allow for generation of integrated g r aphical and textual tools from high-level speciications. In addition , the GOODSTEP platform provides a software p r ocess toolset which enables mod-eling, analysis and enaction of software p r o-cesses and is also built on top of the extended O 2 database. The GOODSTEP platform will be validated using two CASE studies carried out to develop an airline application and a business application. 1 Objective of GOODSTEP The goal of the GOODSTEP project is to develop a sophisticated database system dedicated to the support of software development e n vironments SDEs and make the basis for a platform for SDE construction with a software process toolset and generators for graphical and textual integrated tools implemented on top of it. The GOODSTEP project started Septem-ber 1992 and will last for three years. This paper mainlyreports on the rst year of work within the project. The baseline of the project is an existing European commercially available object-oriented database product: O 2 44. Rather than developing a new database management system from scratch, GOODSTEP will enhance and improve this product. Besides the enhancements and improvements of O 2 which make it an admirably suited system for SDEs, the project provides a number of test cases and performs case studies to evaluate and justify the approach. This includes porting and developing a number of existing software engineering tools on top of the new platform, the development of tool generation capabilities to exploit the …