A Models-to-Program Information Systems Engineering Method

The Model-Driven Development paradigm aims to represent all the information system features through models. Conceptual-Model Programming offers a similar approach, but with a focus on automatic code generation. Both approaches consider modeling and traceability of different abstraction levels, where each level can be tackled with different modeling methods. This heterogeneity introduces a challenge for the quality of the traceability and transformations among models, especially when aiming for automatic code generation. In this paper, we introduce a holistic conceptual-model programming method to generate code from different abstraction levels (from the problem space to the solution space), through three modeling languages whose consistency has been ontologically ensured by two transformation techniques. Particularly, we focus on transformations from the strategic layer using i*, to business process layer using Communication Analysis (CA), and to the system conceptual model layer with OO-Method, which can automatically generate fully functional systems. Even though there are previous works that have proposed partial transformations among these modeling methods, this paper is the first one that deals with the perspective of putting together all the models in a single development method. For each transformation, we discuss what parts can be automatically performed and what parts need human intervention.