Pathos -a Paradigmatic Approach to High-level Object-oriented Software Development

The growing complexity of information systems and the ensuring problems of their development, maintenance and management have highlighted the inadequacy of formal and informal methods for constructing such systems. These problems manifest themselves in the computer systems which are often unmanageable, unreliable , innexible and hence diicult to maintain. Users have often demanded for reliable computer systems because they realize that most failures are due to poor speciication, and design. This has resulted in the emergence of a number of information systems methodolo-gies together with associated computerized development environments in which the Object-Oriented (OO) approach is one of the most recent. OO is often used for promoting software development and its reuse. Languages like Smalltalk reduce not only development time but also the cost of maintenance, simplifying the creation of new systems and the reuse of old ones. Nevertheless OO is not a panacea i.e. eeorts are to put in for its proper use. Thus we consider OO as a paradigm which provides a new image, a new way of conceptualizing the development life cycle. By the help of paradigms, software developers and users are supported in apprehending the development life cycle and means to organize the aspects of the life cycle into a comprehensive method. PATHOS (A Paradigmatic Approach To High-level Object-Oriented Software development) aims to demonstrate an approach to information system development that will lead not only to good information system creation , but also to explicitly represent the maintenance of the business knowledge so as to allow for its more eeective and active exploitation at run time.