ESCAPE Meta Modeling in Software Engineering: When Premature Commitment is Useful in Representations

This paper introduces, and provides a cognitive basis for, a prototype meta-modeling process called ESCAPE. This process involves users Explicitly Stating their own model of an entity of interest, CAPturing an alternative or correct model of that entity and consequently re-Evaluating their own model. The paper shows the model’s implicit, but already well established, use in the software engineering domain. In particular, it focuses on empirical work carried out in Software Understanding and Architectural Recovery of large commercial software systems using the Reflexion modeling process, which embodies ESCAPE meta-modeling principles. Finally, it suggests several areas where ESCAPE meta-modeling could be beneficially applied in software engineering.