The MeTHOOD Approach: Measures, Transformation Rules, and Heuristicsfor Object-Oriented Design
Thomas Grotehen, Klaus R. Dittrich · 1997
The MeTHOOD 1 approach makes design knowledge tangible that will help to improve conceptual object-oriented schemas. Although some of this important knowledge is available in current literature, it is nearly unusable for designers. Therefore, we propose a catalogue of measurements, heuristics, and transformation rules, and introduce an effective integration schema for these elements. This integration schema is the base for a design optimisation process allowing designers to improve conceptual schemata systematically. Besides the integration schema and the process, this paper describes a design support system called MEx 2 . It consists of a design knowledge base (containing definitions of measures, heuristics, and transformation rules) that works on a specification database containing conceptual design schemas. 1 Introduction Designing a "good" object-oriented conceptual schema is difficult. Although there is an agreement that a methodology should include concrete advice for good d...