The deficiencies of the first version of our object model imply
considerable 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 developer's side 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 automatically
generate OMG IDL object descriptions from the object model given in
OMT notation. This enables the integration with the
CORBA development environment.
These requirements were fulfilled by the Software through
Pictures (StP) CASE-tool [1], which contains several
powerful editors for each phase of the software development process.
It enables a rapid prototyping approach by supporting cyclic analysis,
design and implementation steps [10] together with version
control facilities. 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 corresponding
SNMP MIB covered about 40 pages.