Modelling Software Artifacts and Their Relationships in Software Engineering Environments

Software engineering environments (SEE) provide facilities for assisting software developers to carry out activities associated with software projects. These software projects result in various artifacts such as design and source-code documents. Object management systems (OMS) of SEEs deal with the maintenance and management of software artifacts. This includes providing facilities for representing their structures and relationships. In this paper we address two primary object management issues: representing and relating software artifacts in SEEs. We present an artifact representation model that facilitates a natural and ne-grained representation of software documents using an object oriented approach. Artifacts in this model have components, states, properties and a set of operations deened on them. Our relation model allows easy speciication of all forms of relationships. In this model relations are regarded as rst class entities and have attributes, constraints and operations.