Metamodelling for Software Engineering

Book excerpt: Metamodelling for Software Engineering Metamodelling for Software Engineering is a comprehensive and practical guide to a subject that is growing in interest and importance and is becoming the standard way of defining software development methodologies, including both processes and languages such as UML. The ISO/IEC 24744 standard metamodel is adopted throughout the book as a background reference. Metamodelling is often regarded as a complex discipline, much removed from daily practice. This book seeks to demystify metamodelling and explains why it is necessary in the context of software engineering. It covers: Basic concepts and principles of metamodelling. Problems associated with traditional metamodelling, alongside an exploration of possible solutions and alternative approaches. Advanced topics such as the extension of the object-oriented paradigm for metamodelling purposes, or the foundations of powertype-based tool development. A comprehensive case study, which shows how to use the concepts explained in the previous chapters. This thorough and practical guide bridges the gap between the academic realm, where most of the innovation happens, and industry, where the real needs exist. This book will show academics how to approach metamodelling in such a fashion that their research outcomes are useful to industry; lecturers and educators how to teach metamodelling to students so it is well understood and assimilated; industry methodologists how to utilize valuable metamodelling ideas in their daily work and software tool developers how to incorporate the most innovative research outcomes into their products. Focusing on metamodelling as a discipline, exploring its foundations, techniques and results and covering process, product and quality issues under a common framework, this is a unique and timely publication for all software engineering practitioners, academics and students interested in metamodelling.