Incremental Synchronization of Organizational Models, Requirements Models and Object-oriented Software Design Models

The model synchronization between analysis and design artifacts in most cases is still a manual and error-prone process. With the arising of Model-Driven Architecture methodology, automatic transformation between models is mostly possible and can be defined using graph transformation language. Hence models, their corresponding meta-models and model transformation code now become first-class artifacts in software development. Existing model-driven software design derivation approaches usually lack support of bidirectional incremental synchronization between source and target models. Moreover, proposing the full automatic software design derivation, most approaches require some kind of specification on design decision either in a source model or in a transformation definition. The specification in a source model creates a problem of mixture of several concerns in one artifact. The specification in a transformation definition creates a problem of overcomplicated transformations using the languages that were not designed for modeling purpose, making these definitions very hard to comprehend and reuse. This paper argues that artifacts of organizational models, requirements models and software design contain related information that is specified by different means and can be synchronized using incremental bidirectional approach. However, other information that is specific for each artifact should be specified manually in each of the corresponding models.