Eran Gery

I-Logix, Rehovot, Israel,
erang@ilogix.co.il

 
Eran Gery is the VP for Rhapsody product development at I-Logix inc. He is also a co-author of the UML 2.0 response as part of the UML 2.0 consortium, and was a member of the UML founding team.

Eran has over a decade of experience in developing model based development tools for the system, hardware, and software domains. He started his career in this field as a member of the Statemate development team, that together with David Harel and Amir Pnueli pioneered the idea of executable modeling systems. Later, he became the creator and prinicipal architect of the Rhapsody product, the first UML based executable modeling system.

Prior to this, Eran worked as a developer of embedded systems applications in various domains.

Eran holds an MSc in computer science from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion).

Rhapsody: A Complete Life-Cycle Model-Based Development System

by Eran Gery, David Harel and Eldad Palachi

I-Logix, Inc.

We discuss Rhapsody, a UML based software development tool, designed to support complete model-based iterative life-cycle. First, we identify several key inhibiting factors that prevent model-based approaches from being adopted as a mainstream practice. We then examine the requirements for allowing complete life-cycle model-based development and discuss how they are met by Rhapsody through its key enabling technologies, which include:

  • model-code associativity
  • automated implementation generation
  • implementation framework
  • model execution
  • model-based testing

We explain why each of these features is instrumental to an effective development of production systems, based on a key observation that the modeling language does not replace the implementation platform, but should be integrated with it in a synergistic manner. This allows the use of modeling for expressing requirements and design abstractions, along with the use of the full power of an implementation language and its supporting platform to specify implementation details. While allowing this flexibility, Rhapsody facilitates full consistency of the modeling and implementation artifacts throughout the life-cycle, and it also supports a high level of automation in the implementation and validation of the developed system.