Paradigms of modular system development
Michael Goedicke · Institution of Engineering and Technology eBooks · 1990
In this chapter, we characterize the deficiencies of current software development paradigms and propose a new object-oriented development paradigm which eliminates such deficiencies. The deficiencies of current software development paradigms lead in general to program structures which often badly reflect the design decisions during the development. In addition software development process models apply a Procrustes bed to the sequence and nature of development steps. From this analysis we develop a new paradigm of software development which tries to overcome these deficiences. Based on the principles of Divide and Conquer and Separation of Concerns we derive two abstraction concepts. The concept of information hiding abstraction provides a structure for software systems. The concept of information neglection abstraction helps to structure the description of specifications. Based on these structuring concepts a specification language is outlined allowing to express many software properties ranging from high-level design to (nearly) implementation including concurrency and distribution aspects. Since the whole range of software design has a common basis development process models are possible which give the necessary freedom to the developer.Thus it helps considerably to manage the complexity of the software development process.