Tengi interfaces for tracing between heterogeneous components

Abstract

Contemporary software systems comprise many heterogeneous artifacts; some expressed in general programming languages, some in visual and textual domain-specific languages and some in ad hoc textual formats. During construction of a system diverse artifacts are interrelated. Only few formats, typically general programming languages, provide an interface description mechanism able to specify software component boundaries. Unfortunately, these interface mechanisms can not express relations for components containing heterogeneous artifacts. We introduce Tengi, a tool that allows for the definition of software components containing heterogeneous artifacts. Tengi interfaces link components containing different textual and visual software development artifacts ranging from high-level specification documents to low-level implementation documents. We formally define and implement Tengi interfaces, a component algebra and operations on them and present a case study demonstrating Tengi's capabilities. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.