a(MDÆ)2: A Model Driven Approach to Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns with OCL

A typical activity in the object-oriented software engineering process involves the construction of a class structure in terms of which the system behaviour is to be specified. The behaviour, however, commonly consists of multiple tasks, each of which usually needs only part of the information available in that class structure. Additionally, a different representation of the required information may be appropriate. Therefore, it would be useful to be able to have multiple views on the global class structure, each being suitable for the specification of the behaviour related to a certain task. This paper introduces a(MDÆ)2, a technique to realise such a strategy. It incorporates OCL as a powerful query language and advocates a model driven development process which relieves the developer from the burden of manually writing a considerable amount of tedious and error-prone code.