Ontology Driven Software Development for Better Understanding and Maintenance of Software System

Abstract

The last few decades have seen tremendous growth in the IT industry where offshoring software has become a general phenomenon. Due to this offshoring, development and maintenance teams are generally located in different time zones along with at distinct locations. This separation of teams at different locations leads to the problem of sharing information in a consistent manner. In this respect, the Semantic Web plays an essential role as it helps in sharing and reusing already available information. Due to the emergence of the Semantic Web, it has been applied in various Software Engineering tasks and issues. Among those various issues, one is to provide a model or system, which can produce automatic documentation for every version of a software system for their better understanding and maintenance. Therefore, this research paper proposes an ontology driven software development approach for better understanding and maintenance of software system. The research approach consists of a multi-phased framework in a cyclic manner that generates the various versions of software and their associated documentation. To implement and demonstrate the research approach, we picked a case study. The results of the implementation demonstrate that the paper successfully generated all versions of the software along with its automatic documentation. Moreover, the documentation is accessible in machine-understandable together with human-understandable form, which leads to the generation of consistent information without any ambiguity. Thus, the research work helps in better understanding and maintenance of software systems.