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TouchRAM - Part 4: Concern-Orientation

This is an ongoing project.

The TouchRAM project consists in developping a multitouch-enabled tool for agile software design modeling aimed at developing scalable and reusable software design models.

There exist many solutions to solve a given design problem, and it is difficult to capture the essence of a solution and make it reusable for future designs. Furthermore, many variations of a given solution may exist, and choosing the best alternative depends on application-specific high-level goals and non-functional requirements. This part of the TouchRAM project focusses on adding concern-oriented software design capabilities to TouchRAM. Concern-orientation is a modelling technique that focuses on concerns as units of reuse. A concern groups related models serving the same purpose, and provides three interfaces to facilitate reuse. The variation interface presents the design alternatives and their impact on non-functional requirements. The customization interface of the selected alternative details how to adapt the generic solution to a specific context. Finally, the usage interface specifies the provided behaviour.

To support concern-orientation, the RAM meta model must be augmented to support concerns with variation interfaces. The GUI of TouchRAM needs to be capable of representing feature diagrams and impact models, and allow users to select features of a concern and visualize their impact on high-level goals.