Design Management: a Collabortive Design Solution ECMFA 2013 Montpellier, France Maged Elaasar (Presenter) Senior Software Engineer, IBM Jim Conallen Senior Software Engineer, IBM

2 Design is a Key Phase of Development Lifecycle  Reduces software development complexity  Identifies issues early in development lifecycle  Documents technical decisions for stakeholders  Accelerates implementations through model-driven development

3 Challenges for Design Tools Today Designers work in silos unaware of team activities Difficult to express designs in a suitable formalism Difficult to share designs and get feedback from stakeholders Difficult to work in parallel on design with other designers Difficult to manage change and variability of design Difficult to link designs to other lifecycle artifacts Difficult to trace and analyze the impact of design changes Difficult to create reports across multiple designs and lifecycle artifacts

4 Required Design Tool Features  CollaborativeTeam Access  Team Awareness  Lifecycle integration  Configuration management  Parallel development  Expressive Design Domains

5  Rational Design Management (DM) Design Management: a Collaborative Design Solution Rational Software Architect Rational Rhapsody DM Rational Design Management

6 Collaborative Team Access  Shared design respository with one or more clients  Access with role-based permissions  Search using keywords or queries  Browse elements and discover relationships  Collaborate by mark-up, comment, and review RSA Client Rhapsody Client Web Client

7 Team Awareness  Provide a project overview dashboard as a mashup of widgets

8 Lifecycle Integration  Create links to other lifecycle artifacts  Preview link details and navigate to the linked artifact  Create reports and generate documents that cover linked artifacts  Analyze the impact of change to artifacts across the lifecycle

9 Configuration Management  Designs are organized into project  Designs evolve with change sets producing new versions  Design versions are recorded in one or more configurations  A configuration can be changeable (workspace) or frozen (snapshot)  Configurations are organized in a hierarchy

10 Parallel Development  Support a traditional design process  Designer works in a private WS and delivers/rebases to intergration WS  Conflicts are resolved with compare/merge  Support an agile design process  More than one designer work in parallel in same WS  Minimize edit lock-out by maximizing design componentization

11 Expressive Design Domains  Structured Domains  UML, BPMN  Non Structured Domains  Sketches, Rich Text  Custom Domains  Abstract syntax  Concrete syntax  Tool behavior

12 Design Management: Embracing Semantic Web  Semantic web makes it easier to build modern design tools  Representing designs with RDF  Defining design domains with OWL  Linking designs to lifecycle artifacts with OSLC

13 Representing Designs with RDF  Designs are represented as RDF graphs  Design integration (multi-classification, aliases)  Design extension (open world assumption)  Design modularization (multi-definition)  Separation of concerns  Parallel development Activity 1 true

14 Defining Design Domains with OWL  Design domains are defined with OWL ontologies that define  Syntax (some validation, reflective tooling)  Semantics (reasoning, consistency check)  Extra tooling annotations (e.g., componentization, cascade delete)  Generic mapping from/to MOF-defined metamodels  Support for mapping profiles (using multi-classification) Context 1 true

15 Linking Designs to Lifecycle Artifacts with OSLC  DM adopts Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC)  Designs are represented using linked data (URI, RDF graph, etc.)  Designs have expected OSLC properties (e.g., dcterms:title)  Designs may use predefined link propeties (e.g.,dmoslc:validatedBy) Class 1

16 Contributions and Future Work  Described challenges facing software design tools today  Identified features that should help tools meet these challenges  Provided examples in the context of Design Management (DM) tool  Discussed how semantic web can help realize some of those features  Future work includes:  Assess impact of DM on design team productivity through case studies  Define ways to define a rigorous design process  Support configurations across the lifecycle  Support automation of design migration due to domain evolution

17