TAMVE: Properties of Design Technologies to Address Challenges to Software Design in the Era of Agility and Frameworks

It has been over 20 years since software design started the transition from the era of big design documents to the era where agility and the use of sophisticated frameworks has become standard. Design in both eras faced challenges: Big documents are rarely maintained properly; agility results in design either being skipped, lost, or dispersed into multiple small files; frameworks such as Ruby on Rails tend to impose a design on the system, encouraging developers to jump into coding. In this position paper, we suggest how design technologies and notations should have five properties that would help overcome many of the challenges to design in the current era. They should be Textual, Analysable, Multi-technology, Visualizable and Example-rich; we use the acronym TAMVE as a mnemonic for this. We explain how the Umple technology goes a considerable distance towards this achieving the TAMVE vision.CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering -> Software notations and tools