An Interface Between Different Software Development Environments

Information sharing between two well-deened development environments demands data transformation between the tools or the underlying repositories of the environments. We give a solution to the problem of making tools in diierent environments cooperate without modifying the tools or their environments. In building an interface between a kbs environment and a selected case tool we have used a transformation generator called alchemist. This has reduced the work of respecifying the environments for each transformation. We have encountered several problems in the transformation that we have solved, including, e.g., incompatible views of the tools, multiple views, and diierent ways of representing graphical information. Additional problems can be addressed through user interaction before, during, or after the transformation.