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3.1 Tool instrumentation

 

The deficiencies of the first version of our object model imply massive modifications of its structure. It is also necessary to incorporate new provider requirements not previously foreseen into the process of building an optimized object model. On the other hand, the effort on the side of the developer for implementing the necessary changes should be kept as small as possible.
Thus, we decided to base the re-engineering of our management agent on a commercially available CASE-tool compliant to the OMT design method. Another requirement was the ability of the CASE-tool to generate automatically OMG IDL object descriptions from the object model given in OMT notation. This facilitates the integration with the CORBA development environment.
These requirements were fulfilled by the Software through Pictures (StP) CASE-tool [6], which contains several powerful editors for each phase of the software development process. Their navigation features enable rapid prototyping by supporting cyclic analysis, design and implementation steps [9]. The preparation of graphic designs and the application of changes to them in a tabular representation was easily feasible; this is also true for the documentation of the project. Other helpful features were the ability of defining default values for attributes or properties like ''read-only'' already in the modeling phase; the fact that the graphical representation of the object model was always clearly arranged made the design easier. The equivalent SNMP MIB covered about 40 pages.


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