Organizing and Enabling Domain Engineering to Facilitate Software Maintenance

Semantic Designs, Inc. is producing a prototype Design Maintenance System (DMS), a fundamentally different software engineering environment. It is a semantically-based software engineering environment—one which emphasizes tool-supported design capture and modification. We preserve design knowledge by requiring and enabling the design to be updated as a natural by-product of maintenance acts. DMS embodies seven key ideas: 1) Software engineering processes must be comprehensive, i.e., include both development and maintenance. 2) Software maintenance is impossible without domain engineering! 3) The domain definition produced by domain engineering must be machine processable in order to achieve any degree of automation. 4) Domain engineering must produce a set of composable domains rather than a single, large, monolithic one. 5) Recording how domain knowledge is used in the synthesis of an application constitutes the application’s design. A persistent design is essential to effective maintenance. 6) Practical domain engineering must be: • incrementalto scale for maintenance of legacy systems; • cumulativeshould carry into projects other than the one that generated it. 7) Reverse engineering for maintenance should be cast as a domain engineering activity to produce components.