demos

The Object-Process Methodology (OPM) is a system development approach that integrates structure and behavior of the system within a single unifying model. The conventional wisdom has been that there is an inherent dichotomy between object- and process-oriented approaches, and that it is not possible to combine these two essential aspects of any system into one coherent integral frame of reference. This misconception has accompanied systems analysis to the extent that even the current proposal of the UML (Booch and Rumbaugh, 1995; Booch and Rumbaugh, 1996) maintains the separation between structure and behavior.  UML spreads analysis activities across no less than seven types of diagrams: class diagram, use case diagram, message trace diagram, object message diagram, state diagram, module diagram, and platform diagram.

The Goal of OPCAT is to support system development through OPM and to supply a complete Integrated Software Engineering Environment (ISEE) for system developers. OPCAT (acronym for Object-Process CASE Tool) has been developed since 1994 as the Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool to support the Object-Process Methodology. As is the case with many successful industrial application, the development of OPCAT started in the academy--Technion, Israel Institute of Technology--by a team of students as a fourth year undergraduate project in information systems engineering. It was carried out under the guidance and supervision of the Dr. Dov Dori in his capacity as Senior Lecturer at the Technion. Since then OPCAT has evolved from a modest program to a semi-commercial product with version control and configuration management. The current version of OPCAT is Version 1.6.  OPCAT in its current version is designed to serve as a tool for drawing OPD sets. This is the routine activity at the basis of the Object-Process Methodology. The program is written for the Microsoft Windows 95® operating system in Visual C++ and supports multilingual operation, including Hebrew, flexible floating icon boxes and all the other features of a friendly graphic user interface.

The demonstration will focus on a case study which demonstrates the OPM features and the OPCAT current functionality. In particular we will:

1. exemplify how OPDs are constructed and what symbols they consist of;
2. demonstrate OPCAT's Graphic User Interface (GUI) look and feel; and
3. show a simplified portion of a case study that demonstrates OPM's expressive power, scaling mechanisms and one possible application of enterprise modeling.