Using Graph Rewrite Systems for supporting the Software Design Process by Þnding suitable Software Components
Bettina Eva Sucrow, Torsten Heverhagen · 1998
Software engineers have to decide permanently during the software design process whether to specify every necessary software portion of the system to be designed entirely themselves or, rather, to search for and possibly substitute a corresponding suitable software portion already existing and functioning well. Our approach investigates the latter possibility in the following sense: if we presume that software engineers specify their software components in a similar way then it should be possible to compare only abstractly speciÞed components with already concretely speciÞed ones with the goal of substituting the former by the latter, respectively, rather than specifying the whole system in every detail. However, such an approach has only a chance to really work correctly if it is possible to describe a software design process of such a kind by a method offering an intuitive understanding , a formal basis and even, Þnally, a practical result . Our idea is to use graph rewrite systems for this purpose.