The Very Idea of Software Development Environments: A Conceptual Architecture for the ARTS Environment Paradigm

Abstract

For the last three years the authors have been building an instantiation of a system development paradigm, called ARTS. The paradigm consists of a view of what a system development environment is, in general terms, and a methodology for instantiating the paradigm for particular and specific domains of application. The motivation for and the explanation of the paradigm are derived from extant epistemological models of the method of natural science. They assert that these models are directly applicable to the domain of software and systems construction, and that, from them, one can derive principles and explanations for what a software development environment should be. They present briefly the statement view of scientific theories, a conceptual architecture for software development environments whose rationale is given in terms of the statement view and some examples of how the present version of ARTS realises this conceptual architecture.