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newly developed test generation technologies should be integrated with exist-
ing modeling tools and with the test environment of the industrial partners
from the automotive and railway domain. The integration should be realized
in a seamless way, i.e., domain experts with limited knowledge and experience
in usage of formal methods (that will be used for test generation) should also
be able to use them with minimal learning effort.
Related Work.
Tool integration has been a hot research topic over the past
years. There have been a number of early attempts (such as [2]) at integrating
development tools within the context of a well-defined process. They were
rather suited for a particular type of application rather than being generally
usable.
The experience from these approaches has been collected and synthe-
sized into design patterns [3] which are common to most tool integration
approaches of today. An important class is
metamodel-driven tool integration
[4], which is based on the idea of a model bus, a data repository which cap-
tures semantic information on the data that is exchanged between the tools
and provides uniform persistence support. Recent initiatives ([5]) target ad-
vanced features such as model difference computation and model merging,
but their scalability to industrial model sizes is yet to be evaluated. The
workflow-based approach [6] has been (partially) implemented in a number
of tools. The SENSORIA Development Environment [7] offers Eclipse-based
integration interfaces and a simple orchestration language in which small tool
integration processes can be described. jETI [8], a similar tool integration
framework, is targeted at remote invocations for Eclipse-based tools using
Web Services technology. With the increasing emphasis on organized col-
laborative work in software development, high-level team management tools
such as Rational Jazz [9] are emerging, driven by precise process models ex-
ported from modeling environments like the Rational Method Composer or
the Eclipse Process Framework Composer [10].
Goals.
In our solution our goal was to reuse and combine existing technolo-
gies and extending them only if necessary. Thus, our approach is targeted
as a complementary contribution to high-level collaboration integration envi-
ronments. We apply both the metamodel-driven and the process-driven tool
integration patterns and with our solution we address the following objec-
tives:
- Model-based construction of tool-chains. A process metamodel is
created for the definition of those pieces of the development processes that
are related to the execution of tools. The integration of tools required for
a given activity is specified using a
process model
that is an instance of
this metamodel. It includes the tasks, the supporting tools, and also the
input/output artefacts. Available tools can be organized into libraries.
- Automatic derivation of execution configuration. The process mo-
del is mapped automatically to the input language of a
process execution
