Using the metamodel mechanism to support class refinement

With modern software development being a complicated process, refinement has become an inevitable step in software development. To date, however, supporting a refinement process during software development has not received much attention in the research community. In this paper we present a tool which can support class diagram refinement based on a set of proposed rules, each of which is represented by a class diagram together with an object constraint language (OCL) constraint. By applying our existing tool supporting the metadata architecture, a new tool helping software developers find some discrepancies between two class diagrams during software refinement can be generated. A Web-based online learning system is illustrated in this paper to show how the tool can be applied to find discrepancies between the two models at two different levels.