Combining OMT with a Prototyping Approach1

Using the OMT software engineering methodology, a designer starts by identifying objects from the informal requirements specification. By identifying the relations between these objects, a global object model can be produced. Then, in an iterative process, this initial model is refined into an actual program. In this paper, we argue that the OMT methodology does not really help to analyze the requirements of a new proposed parallel system, and suggest combining OMT with the ProSet-Linda prototyping approach to requirements analysis of parallel systems to overcome some of the problems. The experience with this combination for the analysis of the requirements on a specific parallel system — a configurable hospital communication server — is discussed.