KASE: An Integrated Environment for Software Design

Software design consists of determining a high-level organization of a system that meets a given problem specification. We present a prototype system called KASE (Knowledge Assisted Software Engineering) that helps system analysts and designers design and redesign software systems. The KASE environment provides knowledge representation and reasoning tools to integrate knowledge about general software design principles, prototypical software architectures, and application domain. Unlike CASE tools and module interconnection languages that represent the structure of a software system without its semantics, the goal of KASE is to integrate both the structure and the semantics of software modules and to provide active assistance in the design of systems. We illustrate the design process in KASE through an example, focusing on the ability of KASE to provide a co-operative man-machine design environment.