Object-oriented development is a partial-lifecycle software development method in which the decomposition of a system is based upon the concept of an object. This method is fundamentally different from traditional functional approaches to design and serves to help manage the complexity of massive software-intensive systems. The author examines the process of object-oriented development as well as the influences upon this approach from advances in abstraction mechanisms, programming languages, and hardware. The concept of an object is central to object-oriented development and so the properties of an object are discussed. The mapping of object-oriented techniques to Ada using a design case study is considered.

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Object-oriented development

We describe Telos, a language intended to support the development of information systems. The design principles for the language are based on the premise that information system development is knowledge intensive and that the primary responsibility of any language intended for the task is to be able to formally represent the relevent knowledge. Accordingly, the proposed language is founded on concepts from knowledge representations. Indeed, the language is appropriate for representing knowledge about a variety of worlds related to a particular information system, such as the subject world (application domain), the usage world (user models, environments), the system world (software requirements, design), and the development world (teams, metodologies).We introduce the features of the language through examples, focusing on those provided for desribing metaconcepts that can then be used to describe knowledge relevant to a particular information system. Telos' fetures include an object-centered framework which supports aggregation, generalization, and classification; a novel treatment of attributes; an explicit representation of time; and facilities for specifying integrity constraints and deductive rules. We review actual applications of the language through further examples, and we sketch a formalization of the language.

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Telos: representing knowledge about information systems

An ontological model of an information system that provides precise definitions of fundamental concepts like system, subsystem, and coupling is proposed. This model is used to analyze some static and dynamic properties of an information system and to examine the question of what constitutes a good decomposition of an information system. Some of the major types of information system formalisms that bear on the authors' goals and their respective strengths and weaknesses relative to the model are briefly reviewed. Also articulated are some of the fundamental notions that underlie the model. Those basic notions are then used to examine the nature and some dynamics of system decomposition. The model's predictive power is discussed. >

An ontological model of an information system

Is there such a thing anymore as a software system that doesn’t need to be secure? Almost every softwarecontrolled system faces threats from potential adversaries, from Internet-aware client applications running on PCs, to complex telecommunications and power systems accessible over the Internet, to commodity software with copy protection mechanisms. Software engineers must be cognizant of these threats and engineer systems with credible defenses, while still delivering value to customers. In this paper, we present our perspectives on the research issues that arise in the interactions between software engineering and security.

/pdf/software-engineering-for-security-a-roadmap-1t4f9yx03g.pdf

Software engineering for security: a roadmap

The requirements engineering process involves a clear understanding of the requirements of the intended system. This includes the services required of the system, the system users, its environment and associated constraints. This process involves the capture, analysis and resolution of many ideas, perspectives and relationships at varying levels of detail. Requirements methods based on global reasoning appear to lack the expressive framework to adequately articulate this distributed requirementsknowledge structure. The paper describes the problems in trying to establish an adequate and stable set of requirements and proposes a viewpoint-oriented requirements definition (VORD) method as a means of tackling some of these problems. This method structures the requirements engineering process using viewpoints associated with sources of requirements. The paper describes VORD in the light of current viewpoint-oriented requirements approaches and shows how it improves on them. A simple example of a bank auto-teller system is used to demonstrate the method.

http://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/panda/kushiro/ReferencePaper/Requirements%20engineering/00487319.pdf

Requirements engineering with viewpoints

Specification of many kinds of knowledge about the world is essential to requirements engineering. Research on knowledge representation in artificial intelligence provides a wealth of relevant techniques that can be incorporated into specification languages.

Knowledge Representation as the Basis for Requirements Specifications

Knowledge-representation languages have been classified traditionally as declarative or procedural, depending on whether their basic features come from mathematical logic or data structures on one hand, or from programming languages on the other hand. Procedural representation languages are particularly well suited for heuristic knowledge, and their use can lead to efficient searching on the part of an expert system. Many attempts have been made to integrate features of declarative and procedural representation languages. PSN is one attempt that focuses on the integration of semantic network and procedural notions

Mylopoulos

Papers

Knowledge Representation as the Basis for Requirements Specifications

Building Knowledge-Based Systems: The PSN Experience