Describing Software Design Methodologies

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Abstract
There are many software design methodologies, many of which make use of graphical notations and which set out rules governing the construction of graphical representations of a software design. This paper describes a notation which may be used to describe, in a precise way, these design notations and their associated rules. Our notation (GDL) is based on the premise that the graphical representation of a software design always takes the form of a directed graph, and it provides constructs for classifying the nodes and links in that graph and for associating semantics with these. It also allows abstractions and their interfaces to be specified. GDL provides a construct called the representation expression which allows the user to specify how a design component is represented as a symbol and annotations on a diagram, and the user may write down rules about the representation. Our notation is intended as a starting point for a generalised software design editor. An overview of the notation is given here and is illustrated by example.

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