Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 10: Derivation of a fragment of the SCM from the proposition Entity[notrepl]: Hospital
123 Rel: admits Entity[repl]: Patients. Note that the class diagram Derivation Rule (3) has
been applied, considering Entity[notrepl]: Hospital 123 as Entity[repl]: Hospital 123
FUTURE TRENDS
The proposed method paves the way for achieving a range of results. The most im-
mediate is unquestionably the application of POAM to method and technique selection and
adaptation to specifi c development projects. As indicated, this is possible because POAM
provides a quantitative assessment of the fi tness of the conceptual models and methods and
techniques. However, the proposed fi tness metric is far from perfect. On the contrary, this
metric only refers to quasi-syntactic aspects of the model (how much information about the
problem the model represents), and not to other quality criteria like functionality, maintain-
ability, portability, reliability, effi ciency and usability (ISO, 1999). Further investigation of
conceptual model quality and their correspondence with particular problems is, therefore,
required.
Additionally, given POAM's capability for deriving the conceptual models used by
the methods and techniques, a second line of research would be to integrate POAM into
the software development process as a previous step to the use of methods and techniques
(Dieste et al., 2003). This line of research is particularly interesting because the use of
POAM in the early stages of the development process separates analysis from later design,
permitting greater freedom of choice of methods and techniques and, even, thanks to the
ease with which the conceptual models are derived, changes of method or technique during
the software development process.
CONCLUSIONS
Most software development techniques need to be adapted before they can be used
in a particular software development project. This is because the methods and techniques
can be applied to an indeterminate series of paradigmatic problems, but, as each problem
moves further away from the ideal, their effectiveness falls.
Although method and technique adaptation is a recurrent theme in the literature, no
papers that propose any sort of criterion or metric to assess method and technique fi tness for
a given problem have been published. Therefore, in this chapter, we have proposed a method
that can be used to calculate method and technique fi tness for specifi c problems
To calculate method and technique fi tness, it is necessary to identify what makes a
method and technique specifi cally oriented to a given class of problems. One of the reasons
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