Metamodelling for Software Engineering

Preface

Since we realize that no-one reads Prefaces, we'll keep this one short.

This is a book about metamodelling of software development methodologies. From an intuitive point of view, this is directly related to the description, definition or specification of software development methodologies and, consequently, we need to have a very clear idea of what a software development methodology consists of in order to be able to describe, define or specify it. Therefore, we start the book by focusing on answering this question before involving ourselves and you, the reader, in more technical aspects of metamodelling – the main topic of the book.

Once the concept of methodology has been established, we tackle the issue of explaining how methodologies can be described, defined or specified, and, for that matter, which of these three aspects are really relevant to metamodelling. We show that metamodelling is a particular kind of modelling and, therefore, shares many ideas with it. However, metamodelling is an especially tricky case of modelling, because the subject being modelled is easily confused with the language used to model it, and special caution must be taken.

Then we determine the needs of an ideal solution that would allow us to describe, define or specify methodologies; from these needs, the concept of metamodels and metamodelling will emerge. This ideal solution, at least ideal in our current knowledge, uses the idea of a “powertype”, originally introduced to us by Jim Odell. ...