CS 477 Lecture Notes

Week Four, Thursday: MBASE

MBASE stands for Model Based Architecting and Software Engineering and is an approach or philosophy for integrating various models (structured perceptions of the world) and for resolving conflicts (clashes) among the integrated models. MBASE also imposes methodology including a lifecycle model (WinWin Spiral) with specified processes and deliverable documents.

The models integrated by MBASE fall into four classes:

Success models (how do we know when we succeed? Happy users? Money left over? More profitable customer?)
Process models (your customer may want the familiarity of a waterfall lifecycle process model)
Product models (what kind of architecture?)
Property models (how do we estimate the cost before we start?)

"WinWin Spiral" means that a formalized procedure is followed for

Identifying all the stakeholders in the next phase of the spiral.
Analyzing the win conditions and success models of the stakeholders.
Resolving conflicts in the various success models.
Documenting the decisions made in the process.

A number of CASE tools have been integrated with MBASE including GroupSystems (a customer requirements negotiation tool) and Rational Software's Rose (a Unified Modeling Language (UML) specification and design tool).

This lecture is presented with overhead projector slides developed by the Center for Software Engineering at USC. PowerPoint soft copy of the slides are available from the Resources page.

This page established February 3, 1998; last updated January 30, 1999, by Rick Wagner.