Adaptation and Implementation of the ISO42010 Standard to Software Design and Modeling Tools

Model cantered software development practices adoption remains limited to small niche domains. The broad development practices remain code centric. Modeling tool complexity is often cited as a significant factor limiting the adoption and negatively affecting user experience. Modeling and design tools complexity are due to multiple factors including complexity of the underlying language, weak support for methodologies, and insensitivity to users’ concerns. This results in modeling and design tools that expose all or most of their capabilities and elements at once, often overwhelming users and negatively affecting user experience. The problem is further exacerbated when a tool supports multiple domain-specific modeling languages that are defined on top of a base language such as UML. In this case, the tool customizations and visual elements necessary to support each language often interfere with each other and further exacerbate the modeling tool complexity. In this paper, we present a novel and systematic approach to reduce the complexity of design and modeling tools by introducing an interpretation and adaptation of the ISO42010 standard on architecture description specific to the software domain. We demonstrate this approach by providing a working implementation as part of the Papyrus opensource modeling framework. In this approach, we leverage the notions of Architecture Contexts and Architecture Viewpoints to enable heterogeneous UML-based languages to be independently supported and help contextualize the exposed tool capabilities. This paper presents the ISO42010 interpretation and adaptation to software design and architecture and a case study with several definitions of architecture contexts. The implementation of this novel approach demonstrates the ability for multiple modeling languages and notations to coexist without interference and provides significant reduction in the exposed capabilities in the UI. Reducing design and modeling tool complexity has a potential to significantly broaden the adoption of modeling and design practices in the software engineering sphere.