Summary of software designer's associates project
Masatoshi Matsuo · International Software Process Workshop · 1989
A Software Designer's Associates (SDA) is, 1) a workstation-based, coherent, upgradable collection of tools, 2) capable of supporting the description, evaluation and comparison of software system architectural designs, and 3) molded to a specific user's habits, the tasks a designer is performing and the method a designer is using. Each SDA is a specific instance of a generic facility which supports a team member's design activities, cooperation among team members, and overall team management. It provides a framework for the integration of tools supporting the use of various notations within the context of a particular set of technical and managerial methods.The SDA project is a joint effort involving a consortium of researchers from academic and industrial organizations in both Japan and the United States. Currently, 19 organizations are participating the project. For past two years, the project is focused on the following major themes: requirements definition for SDAs,models for integrating software environments,alternative architectures for generic and specific SDAs,object, process and adaptation server concept definitions,environment infrastructure, andspecial tools.Prototyping is being performed in the following areas: support for the use of formalisms (algebraic, attribute grammar),demonstration of the ability to use relational/object-oriented technology, anddemonstration of the ability to provide a skeletal SDA and generators to create specific SDA's.Additional efforts are related to software process description. The approach to process description includes: a non-procedural technique for general activity sequence modelingextensions to existing formalism such as imperative, procedural language, algebraic specification languages, rule-based languages, attribute grammar based languages, and Petri Nets and state transition diagrams.Descrition of well-known methodologies have been written using some of the above approaches. Also, an attempt has been made to describe design processes for actual software projects among participating organizations.The Process Server is one of the key components for an SDA. It is a logical component which supports conformance to the policies defined by the software process which is supported by the environment. It is knowledgeable about the process's artifacts, operations, constraints and criteria. It should also assist in recording, monitoring, guiding and enacting process related activities.