An Open-Source Pivot Language for Proprietary Tool-Chaining

Abstract

Nowadays industrial software development faces an increasing system complexity together with the necessity to significantly decrease costs and time of the development process and to release at the same time high-quality products. As a consequence, they typically adopt a constellation of proprietary tools, each of which deals with particular stages of the overall development process, namely design, testing, and deployment to mention a few. Model-Driven Engineering techniques are gaining a growing interest as an efficient approach to tackle the current software intricacy. However, the use of a multitude of proprietary tools requires the redundant specification of characteristics of the system and hampers their chaining. This work reports the experience gained in industrial settings: problems arisen from the usage of different tools for different aims during the development process are discussed, moreover, a possible solution based on an open-source pivot language acting as a bridge to share information between different proprietary tools is illustrated.