Resumen de A method for the unified definition and treatment of conceptual schema quality issues
David Aguilera Moncusí
The modern world is software-intensive. National infrastructures, smartphones and computers, health-care systems, e-commerce... everything is run by software. Therefore, developing high-quality software solutions is essential for our society. Conceptual modeling is an early activity of the software development process whose aim is to define the conceptual schema of a domain. As the role played by conceptual schemas in software development becomes more relevant---because of, for example, the emergence of model-driven approaches---, their quality becomes crucial too. The quality of a conceptual schema can be analyzed in terms of ``quality properties''. All conceptual schemas should have the fundamental properties of syntactic and semantic correctness, relevance and completeness, as well as any other quality property that has been proposed in the literature and that may be required or recommended in particular projects. It is a fact that only a few quality properties have been integrated into the development environments used by professionals and students, and thus enforced in the conceptual schemas developed by them. A possible explanation of this unfortunate fact may be that the proposals have been defined in the literature in disparate ways, which makes it difficult to integrate them into those environments. The goal of this thesis is to ease the integration of those quality properties that can be evaluated using the conceptual schema itself. We propose a method that permits the unified definition and treatment of conceptual schema quality issues, which we understand as ``important quality topics or problems for debate or discussion''. Our work includes, on the one hand, a characterization and formalization of conceptual schema quality issues, and, on the other hand, the creation of a catalog of quality issues obtained from the literature and defined using the aforementioned formalization. We also provide a prototype implementation of our method, which integrates the catalog of quality issues on top of a real modeling tool. This implementation provides assistance to conceptual modelers during the development of a conceptual schema in a non-disruptive manner. Moreover, our thesis discusses incremental methods for the efficient evaluation of OCL expressions in the context of quality issues and integrates one of them into our prototype tool.
