Software engineering is a composite of data and rules about how those data are composed, presented to various users, and transformed as software development proceeds. An appropriate comouter-aided software engineering (CASE) environment (SEE) must easily handle data and rules. Currently available commercial programming languages and database management systems (DBMS) tend to be able to handle either data or rules well, but not both simultaneously. Using a standard RDBMS and an open architecture would allow CASE tools to be defined as sets of schemas and semantic rules. Development would be defined as sets of transformational rules. The automatic nature of this approach improves the reliability of developed software and decreases the time and cost of it. Softworld, Inc., is proving the feasibility of the approach by expanding a previously initiated example application. The example will span all views including development and implementation phases. The requisite syntactic, and project constraints, will be identified. A constraint languag@ syntax will be specified.The potential commercial application as described by the awardee: Two areas of potential commercialization exist: (1) an extended constraint subsystem, and (2) individual CASE methodology tool rule bases. The constraint subsystem would handle the identified constraint types. The individual CASE tool rule bases would be predefined schemas and syntactic and transformational rules for each software engineering methodology.
