Software maintainability improvement: integrating standards and models

Software standards are highly recommended because they promise faster and more efficient ways for software development with proven techniques and standard notations. Designers who adopt standards like UML and design patterns to construct models and designs in the processes of development suffer from a lack of communication and integration of various models and designs. Also, the problem of implicit inconsistency caused by making changes to components of the models and designs will significantly increase the cost and error for the process of maintenance. In this paper, an XML-based unified model is proposed to solve the problems and to improve both software development and maintenance through unification and integration.