Single Underlying Models for Projectional, Multi-View Environments

Multi-view environments provide different views of software systems optimized for different stakeholders. One way of ensuring consistency of overlapping and inter-dependent information contained in such views is to project them “on demand” from a Single Underlying Model (SUM). However, there are various ways of building and evolving such SUMs. This paper presents criteria to distinguish them, describes three archetypical approaches for building SUMs, and analyzes their advantages and disadvantages. From these criteria, guidelines for choosing which approach to use in specific application areas are derived.