Domain-Specific Multimodeling

Enterprise systems are complex artifacts. They are hard to build, manage, understand,
and evolve. Existing software development paradigms fail to properly address challenges
such as system size, domain complexity, and software evolution when development
is scaled to enterprise systems. We propose domain-specific multimodeling as a
development paradigm to tackle these challenges in a language-oriented manner.
The different concerns of a system are conceptually separated and made explicit as
independent domain-specific languages. This approach increases productivity and
quality by raising the overall level of abstraction. It does, however, also introduce a
new problem of coordinating multiple different languages in a single system. We call
this problem the coordination problem.
In this thesis, we present the coordination method for domain-specific multimodeling
that explicitly targets this coordination problem. By systematically identifying language
interactions, we can specify a coordination model for the system. Specifically, we
explicitly identify name bindings and references across language boundaries. We argue
that such a coordination model facilitates consistency, navigation, and guidance during
development with multiple languages. An evaluation of the method in two medium-sized
case studies shows promising results