Enforcement of conceptual schema quality issues in current integrated development environments

Abstract

We believe that one of the most effective ways of increasing the quality of conceptual schemas in practice is by using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that enforces all relevant quality criteria. With this view, in this paper we analyze the support provided by current IDEs in the enforcement of quality criteria and we compare it with the one that could be provided given the current state of the art. We show that there is a large room for improvement. We introduce the idea of a unified catalog that would include all known quality criteria. We present an initial version of this catalog. We then evaluate the effectiveness of the additional support that could be provided by the current IDEs if they enforced all the quality criteria defined in the catalog. We focus on conceptual schemas written in UML/OCL, although our approach could be applied to other languages.