Abstract

Enterprise systems are complex artifacts. They are hard to build, manage, understand, and evolve. Existing software development paradigms fail to properly address challenges such as system size, domain complexity, and software evolution when development is scaled to enterprise systems. We propose domain-specific multimodeling as a development paradigm to tackle these challenges in a language-oriented manner. The different concerns of a system are conceptually separated and made explicit as independent domain-specific languages. This approach increases productivity and quality by raising the overall level of abstraction. It does, however, also introduce a new problem of coordinating multiple different languages in a single system. We call this problem the coordination problem.

In this thesis, we present the coordination method for domain-specific multimodeling that explicitly targets this coordination problem. By systematically identifying language interactions, we can specify a coordination model for the system. Specifically, we explicitly identify name bindings and references across language boundaries. We argue that such a coordination model facilitates consistency, navigation, and guidance during development with multiple languages. An evaluation of the method in two medium-sized case studies shows promising results.