Nowadays cloud services and complex cyber{physical systems gradually nd their way into practice. As a result the need for end{to{end software quality management across platform and organizational boundaries has become paramount. One solution proposed by the software engineering community is the use of integrated model repositories for interchanging, interlinking and analyzing software engineering data and coordinating actions of manifold stakeholders working on this data. With MoVE, the Model Evolution Engine, we have developed a model repository supporting model{based data management in heterogeneous tool environments. The state machine based work ow concept allows a tight integration of data and automated and manual actions on the repository in a change{driven way. In this paper we will present the essential components of our MoVE Framework, starting with an introduction of the most important concepts, followed by the state based work ow language which will be contained in our demonstration 1.
Modern software systems tend to consist of fragmented services across devices,
platforms and organizational boundaries. To handle the rising complexity of
such systems the consideration of end{to{end quality management is of major
importance. For example the management of security in large{scale system like
national health records requires coordinated e orts of heterogeneous
stakeholders. Ranging from security engineers tackling technical issues such as designing
secure software services to non{technical stakeholders such as compliance
managers, surveying legal regulations, are also involved. As a consequence these
systems demand for a consolidated treatment of data and processes in the realm
of IT management, software engineering and systems operation [
Standards such as ITIL [
With MoVE, the Model Versioning and Evolution Engine, we have
conceptualized and implemented a model repository referring not only to the data
integration aspect but also the collaboration aspect. The MoVE{approach has a focus
on continuous model integration for software engineering. MoVE provides
methods to achieve traceability across tools, by applying concepts of meta{modelling
and interlinkage. A key feature of MoVE is support for change{driven
engineering, which is a novel methodology to cope with system evolution by supporting
work ows triggered by changes of the systems data artifacts. The work ow
language enables quality management to support change management as described
in standards and guidelines such as ITIL [
In Section 2 we will summarize the important concepts of the MoVE Framework. Section 3 describes the novel MoVE Work ow language, which is used to established a change{driven process. 2
Concepts and Architecture of the MoVE Framework
tools. These client{side tools are not limited to UML modelling tools. In the current environment we have developed e.g. a MoVE Adapter for Microsoft Excel to demonstrate the applicability of our concepts in a heterogeneous tool environment. The MoVE Adapter's main responsibility is to manage the mapping between the tool data representation and the representation in the MoVE Framework. CRUDQ{Services interact with the MoVE Engine, which is the main component of the MoVE server{side.
The major tasks of the MoVE Engine are to support versioning and persistency for all model elements stored in the MoVE Repository and to provide a Plug{in Interface. MoVE is event{driven in terms of generating an event for each change of a model or model element (using the CRUDQ{Services for changes). Each occurring change is analysed and then transformed into a change event. Server{side MoVE plug{ins listen to certain types of events and can trigger further actions. A Plug{in System allows users to register plug{ins for every (partial) model separately and therefore to decide which event should result in further actions. A crucial consumer of change events is the MoVE State Machine Engine, which allows to create state machine based work ows triggered by change events. Due to the importance of the MoVE work ow methodology it be described in Section 3 in more details.
The general idea of our state machine based work ow approach is that a model element can evolve during the operation of a system and typically undergoes a dedicated life cycle which is represented as a UML state machine. Fig. 2: System Model In Magic Draw with Updates for the Security Model in MS Excel
Each model element in the CMM can be attached with states and state machines. The states determine the quality gates in the quality lifecycle of the model element, like a Security Requirement being in the states ADDED, COMPLETE or EVALUATED. Transitions between states may be triggered in an automatic way by internal events stemming from other state machines, a timer or change events created by the MoVE Engine. Alternatively, manual transitions need user interaction which is implemented via systems such as mail 3. Each transition can be guarded by conditions de ned in OCL or the Hibernate Query Language (HQL).
Figure 2 shows two screenshots from our demonstration. The underlying CMM links a System Model with security requirements. The con gured workows control that on change of elements of the System Model, the linked security requirements have to be be re{evaluated. On the left side one can see a System Model designed with Magic Draw. On the right side, a spreedsheet{view in MS Excel contains the linked security requirements. Figure 2 shows the situation after an update of the System Model. The state of the linked security requirement changes from EVALUATED to ADDED and thus causes a re{evaluation of the security requirements.
In case a state has changed, it is possible to de ne a number of actions onEntry of the new state and onExit of the current state. These actions e.g. may involve external systems such as mail to notify stakeholders. Actions can be de ned with two options: (i) The MoVE Executeable Pro le contains several
prede ned actions that can be composed in standard UML activity diagrams. Using this option it is possible to trigger prede ned actions in a certain order but with limited expressiveness. (ii) Alternatively it is possible to use the fUML standard to create rich activity diagrams. FUML supports not only the actions de ned in the MoVE Executeable Pro le but a huge subset of UML activity diagrams. This enables users to create complex model changes on state changes. 4
In this demonstration paper we have sketched the MoVE framework which is a powerful model repository that integrates model storage capabilities.
The MoVE framework has been developed within the EU-IST project
SecureChange [