SynchroState: A SPEM-based Solution for Synchronizing Activities
and Products through State Transitions
Amal Rochd1, Maria Zrikem1,
Thierry Millan2, Christian Percebois2, Claude
Baron3,
and Abderrahmane Ayadi1
1Laboratory of Modeling and
Information Technologies, University of Cadi Ayyad, Morocco
2Institut
de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, Université de Toulouse, France
3Laboratoire
d’Analyse et d’Architecture des Systèmes, Université de Toulouse, France
Abstract: Software engineering
research was always focused around the efficiency of software development
processes. Recently, we noticed an increasing interest in model-driven
approaches in this context. Models that were once merely descriptive, are
nowadays playing a productive role in defining engineering processes and
managing their lifecycles. However, there is a problem that has not been
considered enough; it is about sustaining consistency between products and the
implicated activities during the process lifecycle. This issue, identified in
this paper as the synchronization problem, needs to be resolved in order to
guarantee a flawless execution of a software process. In this paper, we present
a SPEM-based solution named SynchroState that highlights the relationship
between process activities and products. SynchroState's goal is to ensure
synchronization between activities and products in order that if one of these
two entities undergoes a change, the dependents entities should be notified and
evolved to sustain consistency In order to evaluate SynchroState, we have
implemented the solution using the AspectJ language and validated it through a
case study inspired from the ISPW-6 software process example. Results of this
study demonstrate the automation of synchronization of product state following a
change in the activity state during the evolution of the process execution.
Keywords: Synchro state, SPEM, metamodeling, process model, synchronization, aspectJ.