Multi-view modeling of software systems

Software construction is essentially a modeling task. The most important decisions in software development are decisions that deal with modeling. The better, the more adequate and more powerful the available modeling paradigms are, the easier the program development task is and the better its results are. However, a large complex software system can hardly be described and understood by providing one huge model. Instead a number of partial models are used that describe certain aspects of software systems in so-called views and that are in certain mutual relationships such as in levels of abstraction. In the following we describe the role of models and views in program development and show how closely the issue of modeling is related to the so-called formal methods in program development. Moreover, we give a comprehensive family of models of aspects of software systems and show how to relate and integrate them.