The deficiencies of the first version of our object model imply massive
modifications of its structure. It is also necessary to incorporate
new provider requirements not previously foreseen into the process of
building an optimized object model. On the other hand, the effort on
the side of the developer for implementing the necessary changes
should be kept as small as possible.
Thus, we decided to base the re-engineering of our management agent on
a commercially available CASE-tool compliant to the OMT design
method. Another requirement was the ability of the CASE-tool to
generate automatically OMG IDL object descriptions from the object
model given in OMT notation. This facilitates the integration with the
CORBA development environment.
These requirements were fulfilled by the Software through
Pictures (StP) CASE-tool [6], which contains
several powerful editors for each phase of the software development
process. Their navigation features enable rapid prototyping by
supporting cyclic analysis, design and implementation steps
[9]. The preparation of graphic designs and the application
of changes to them in a tabular representation was easily feasible;
this is also true for the documentation of the project. Other helpful
features were the ability of defining default values for attributes or
properties like ''read-only'' already in the modeling phase; the fact
that the graphical representation of the object model was always
clearly arranged made the design easier. The equivalent SNMP MIB
covered about 40 pages.