Realization of an Integrated Software Engineering Environment through Heterogeneous CASE-Tool Integration

The development of large software systems needs appropriate automated support in the form of an integrated software engineering environment (ISEE) to support the system development process. This paper describes an approach, the CUBE approach, to integrate heterogeneous CASE tools and system development perspectives, in order to realize an ISEE. Heterogeneous refers to the Conventional system development paradigm as opposed to the Object-oriented system development paradigm. Integration between these paradigms and also its supporting tools can be realized by employing meta-models. Hence, a method link as well as a tool link can be realized. To a certain extent, this approach is not only limited to only heterogeneous Analysis and Design Tools, but may be applicable to other heterogeneous system development tools. An example outlines the integration of the data perspective of the methods Structured Analysis (Yourdon) and OMT (Rumbaugh), by using meta-models.