A Model Transformation Approach For Mobile Application

Abstract-The quality of software is an important topic in the development of successful software application. Many software development methods have been applied to enhance the software quality. The improvement of software quality can be achieved through using refactoring which improves the internal structure of a software without changing its external behavior. However, refactoring effects the quality attributes of software such as reusability, complexity, maintainability, flexibility, modularity, modifiability, and understandability. Thus there is a need to proof the imprint of refactoring on the software quality. This paper will propose a software development model under the refactoring method concept. In addition, an evaluation will be conducted to check the effectiveness of the reusability and modifiability quality attributes on a software development process with and without applying the refactoring method. As a result, this study can be used by developers to aid them in determining whether or not to apply refactoring to improve quality attributes.

Roger S. Pressman, Ph.D. SOFTWARE ENGINEERING A Practitioner’s Approach, McGraw-Hill, an imprint of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Americas, New York, NY -10020, 2001.

As design moves forward, the development teams begin to generate a tremendous amount of detailed information about the system. Modules, classes, data fields, data structures, forms, reports, methods, subroutines, and tables are all being defined in substantial detail in the design model. The key design tasks are decomposing the application into layers, clients, and servers, distributing the “pieces” across hardware platforms, and defining the physical network and protocols.

The smart phone app pilot project is a proof of concept project to show if it was possible to develop fully functioned smart phone apps on both IOS and android platform in a certain amount of time (9 months).

Since the software has been evolving with time, the code has become more complex, hence the software development cost’s major part is given to software maintenance. Refactoring or restructuring is the problem which implies the need of techniques that reduce software complexity by improving software quality. Refactoring is “the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code, yet improves its internal structure”. The classes,

UML which stands for Unified Model Language is a developmental modelling language that allows the user to specify and visualise document models of software systems. UML comes in a large amount of tools that allow you to analyse your applications future requirements and develop a solution to achieve these requirements. The current version of Unified Modeling Language version contains thirteen different types of diagrams that can be separated into three categories: Structure Diagrams and Behaviour Diagrams and Interaction Diagrams.

The focus of object-oriented view is on the elaboration of design classes that belong to both problem and infrastructure domains. Classes are elaborated by specifying messaging details, identifying interfaces, defining attribute data structures, and describing process flow for operations. In traditional view, three components are refined, they are control modules, domain modules, and infrastructure modules. To generate programming language source code detailed representations of data structures, interfaces and algorithms for each program are to be created.

Android and IOS are the most popular operating systems nowadays. Both systems have their unique features which beneficial to users and apps developer. Unfortunately , they are completely different programming style so that one code will not be able to be satisfied for both operating systems. This meant we needed to make two versions of the same application, most developers were only opting either for Android or IOS, which lead to the increase of developing time and difficulties.

In the last two decades modeling notations and tools subsequently claimed to be the "silver bullets" for success in software development, however, expectations were not met. This is due in large part to another important element, development methodology, had been postponed. They are worthless if good notations and tools for application directives are not provided. So, this decade has begun with a growing interest in development methodologies. Until recently he led the development process associated with a strong emphasis on process control through a rigorous definition of roles, activities and artifacts, including modeling and detailed documentation. This "traditional" scheme to address software development has proven effective and necessary in large projects (regarding time and resources), which usually requires a high degree of ceremony in the process. However, this approach is not be the most suitable for many current projects where the system environment is changing, and where required drastically reduce development time while maintaining high quality. Given the difficulties in using traditional methods with these constraints of time and flexibility, many development teams resign

The Unified Modeling language (UML) was released by the Object Management Group (OMG) in the effort to provide a standardized design language to build and develop computer applications. The purpose of the design language is to allow IT professionals to distribute system structure and design plans in a comprehensible graphical manner, similar to blueprints of a building. Modeling is an important part of software projects, large and small. With modeling, the software development team are better able to work with the end-user in providing a visual program design. Surveys reveal that the development of large software applications have many impediments and have a large probability of failure. Modeling provides a greater opportunity for

The Unified Modeling Language (UML), with its fourteen various diagram types, is a standard notation for the modeling of real-world objects as a first step in developing an object-oriented design method. Although a lot of semantics in the UML, we can widely describe in the more details the system that will be developed, but we cannot make sure the correctness and consistency of the designed model. Therefore, it is important to reduce the error from verifying user model in the early phase, When those errors are discovered early in the design process it is easier and more cost helpful to fix than if they were discovered at a later phase. The issue of consistency and inconsistency have appeared since its infancy of the software development. These problems are bigger still in UML software development, and are mainly reason of the presence of multiple-views (models) for the same system, and It can contain potentially contradictory system specifications. In other meaning, the UML diagrams describing a software must be consistent because inconsistencies between all diagrams in UML It will be the source of the increase defects and errors in the software systems. It is therefore important that these inconsistencies be detected in the system, analyzed and hopefully fixed before implementing it. Without consistency analysis, it would be hard to evolve the model and ensure that the collaborative effort is coherent. Although there are a lot of research and studies that focus on the

Pressman, Roger S., Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach (4th Edition), McGraw-Hill International Editions, 1997. Pages 400 to 405.

In this project a descriptinve UML modelling for an elevator control system is depicted. Elevator system can be considered as an real time embedded system and hence the object oriented concepts of UML can be exploited. Although the current object-oriented analysis and design methods focus only on the software of a system which might be troublesome for a real time system merely because of more comprehensive and intellegent approach that it requires. Some of the real time aspects that needs to be considered are :

The main advantage of this approach to benefit from the UML standard modeling notation and the training done with software engineers to model the software with the UML notation

In this section, we are listing some common methods that were adopted in testing the mobile application testing for our project. Normally, more than one solution available to test the whole system. Normally testing of an application or system is carried out by analyzing each part i.e. module of the system and how each module is integrated. Then by using the most appropriate and effective test for each module, the whole system is tested.