The GOODSTEP project: general object-oriented database for software engineering processes

The goal of the GOODSTEP project is to enhance and improve the functionality of a fully object-oriented database management system to yield a platform suited for applications such as software development environments (SDEs). The baseline of the project is the O₂ database management system (DBMS). The O₂ DBMS already includes many of the features regulated by SDEs. The project has identified enhancements to O₂ in order to make it a real software engineering DBMS. These enhancements are essentially upgrades of the existing O₂ functionality, and hence require relatively easy extensions to the O₂ system. They have been developed in the early stages of the project and are now exploited and validated by a number of software engineering tools built on top of the enhanced O₂ DBMS. To ease tool construction, the GOODSTEP platform encompasses tool generation capabilities which allow for generation of integrated graphical and textual tools from high-level specifications. In addition, the GOODSTEP platform provides a software process toolset which enables modeling, analysis and enaction of software processes and is also built on top of the extended O₂ database. The GOODSTEP platform is to be validated using two CASE studies carried out to develop an airline application and a business application