The MeTHOOD Approach: Measures, Transformation Rules, and Heuristics for Object-Oriented Design

The MeTHOOD1 approach makes design knowledge tangible that will help to improve conceptual object-oriented schemas. Although some of this important knowledge is available in current literature, it is nearly unusable for designers. Therefore, we propose a catalogue of measurements, heuristics, and transformation rules, and introduce an effective integration schema for these elements. This integration schema is the base for a design optimisation process allowing designers to improve conceptual schemata systematically. Besides the integration schema and the process, this paper describes a design support system called MEx2. It consists of a design knowledge base (containing definitions of measures, heuristics, and transformation rules) that works on a specification database containing conceptual design schemas.