Specification and implementation of a distributed planning and information system for courses based on story driven modelling

Abstract

Current object-oriented modelling methods focus on the specification of the static structure of software objects and their interaction at runtime. A major deficiency of these methods is that they do not provide means to specify the dynamic evolution of object structures. In this paper we propose a novel method called Story Driven Modelling (SDM) as a complementation to existing OO approaches. SDM employs so called story boards to analyse the dynamics of object structures as sequences of graphical snap shots for sample scenarios. A major benefit of this approach is that story boards are well understood even by laities, while they have well-defined syntax and semantics that gives way to semi-automatic derivation of subsequent specifications, like, for example, the static class hierarchy and dynamic operations on object structures. For the latter SDM employs a high-level, partly-graphical formalism called story flow diagram, which is based on the theory, of programmed graph rewriting systems. In this paper we illustrate SDM with a sample case study which is the development of a course program planning system for the computer science department at Paderborn University. We choose this particular example from a number of SDM applications since its domain theory is very similar to the reference example for IWSSD-9 (The Meeting Scheduler System).