Warming up ISA
Iteration 4: What is there to express ? The ISA roadmap.
We have seen in the previous Posts that LL is needed to express ISA. But what is there to express exactly ? What is the content to write ?
These questions lead to establish an ISA roadmap.
This roadmap is some kind of software building process. The outputs of the preceding phases being the inputs of the current phase.
This is also the opportunity to establish the major phases of the software life cycle. These phases that are the LL goal. Therefore, during the ISA building process, I will also elaborate at the same time the “Last Language”.
That is a consequence for LL, to be both its own metamodel and to target the software life cycle.
The table below shows this process steps.
| Inputs I |
Activities A |
Outputs (*) O |
|
Ideas |
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| I | Ideas | Vision document | Business Requirements |
Business |
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| B | Business Requirements |
|
|
Functional |
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| F | functional Requirements |
|
|
Software |
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| S |
|
|
|
Test |
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| T |
|
|
|
Production |
|||
|
P |
|
|
|
(*) Most outputs are Assemblies, in particular Requirements.
Following the table above, we have just elaborated the vision documentation (Cf. Process table cell: A, I). This was the purpose of posts about Wishes, Foundations, etc.
The next step now is to express Business requirements (Cf. Process table cell: O, I).
| Top-Down versus Bottom-Up process
Readers could think that the process steps above are oriented toward a top-down approach. That's not false. However, LL being a full scope “software development stack” language, one can start using it at several level. For instance, you might have written some code first. To do that, you have necessarly defined at least one Use Case, one Object/Class and an assembly. Well, since the traceability links can be established later from these artifacts, nothing prevents the capability to elaborate functional artifacts later, neither from syntactic point of view nor from the semantic one. |