An alternative software development model supporting software evolution

Producing high quality software within a budget and schedule is still a problem. In order to increase the productivity and reliability the development methodology should concentrate on requirements specifications and design phases and support an incremental development process. This paper discusses a software design environment for realizing such a methodology. The integrated software design environment consists of a number of tools integrated for capturing, presenting and exercising software design information. A design representation language which provides high level constructs for encoding design knowledge is introduced into the environment as a uniform basis for integrating different phases of the development process. This paper includes a detailed analysis of the structure of the software design environment and its language as well as its prototype that has been built. A design example is also given to demonstrate the behavior of the prototype