Design Maintenance System^®

DMS^® is a 21st Century Vision for
Software Engineering and Software Maintenance

A software engineering environment that supports the incremental engineering and maintenance of large application systems, driven by domain knowledge, semantics, captured designs and automation.

DMS records:

• what the software is supposed to do (specification),
• how the software does it (the code), and
• why the software works correctly (the design).

Using practical program generation and transformation technology, DMS will enable designers to:

• understand the design, and
• modify the design to obtain new code

while yielding a 50% reduction in software maintenance cost and cycle time

• by reducing the program understanding cost
• by eliminating errors in implementing changes
• by reusing sophisticated, performant implementation knowledge

The DMS concept is fundamentally different from other Software Engineering methods:

• DMS emphasizes tool-supported design capture and modification.
• DMS organizes problem domain concepts and code generation knowledge into domains.
• A hierarchy of domains shows how to map abstract problem domain ideas to target languages.
• DMS uses the domains to transform specified domain concepts to code for the problem at hand.
• The software engineer can navigate the recorded map to understand how the code works.
• DMS requires the design to be updated before the code, so design knowledge isn't lost.

The DMS vision thus provides a continuous, incremental model of software construction.

We call this approach a semantically-based software engineering method, because DMS "understands" far more about the problem and the final program than conventional CASE tools.

What can one do with a DMS-like technology?

• Legacy code modification and reverse engineering (Software maintenance, code porting, restructuring, optimization, design recovery to domain abstractions, massive changes)
• Domain-specific program generation (Factory Control synthesis, Partial Differential Equation solver generators, Entity-Relationship compilers,Your Domain Here)

DMS is designed for large scale software systems

• Reusable knowledge about problem and technology areas organized as domains
• Fast parsing and transformation engines (procedures, trees, graphs)
• Software Engineers as clients, DMS as server
• Implemented in SD's parallel programming language, PARLANSE
• Presently supports C++

Additional Information:

Technical Papers Related to DMS

DMS R&D was funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Advanced Technology Program

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DMS and "Design Maintenance System" are registered trademarks of Semantic Designs, Inc.
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