Rhapsody: A Complete Life-Cycle Model-Based Development System

Abstract

We discuss Rhapsody, a UML based software development tool, designed to support complete model-based iterative life-cycle. First, we identify several key inhibiting factors that prevent model-based approaches from being adopted as a mainstream practice. We then examine the requirements for allowing complete life-cycle model-based development and discuss how they are met by Rhapsody through its key enabling technologies, which include:

• model-code associativity

• automated implementation generation

• implementation framework

• model execution

• model-based testing

We explain why each of these features is instrumental to an effective development of production systems, based on a key observation that the modeling language does not replace the implementation platform, but should be integrated with it in a synergistic manner. This allows the use of modeling for expressing requirements and design abstractions, along with the use of the full power of an implementation language and its supporting platform to specify implementation details. While allowing this flexibility, Rhapsody facilitates full consistency of the modeling and implementation artifacts throughout the life-cycle, and it also supports a high level of automation in the implementation and validation of the developed system.