The DYNAMO Home Page

DYNAMO is an environment that supports construction and exploration of scenarios. The scenarios we are working with describe the interaction among objects in an object-oriented design situation. Currently, we only support design with passive objects.

The problem.
In most cases, object-oriented design is carried out at the static level. That is, a design is formulated as a number of classes which are related to each other in a number of ways. The classes may contain attributes and methods. In some situations, it is more direct to initiate the design process at a dynamic level. This may be the cases in compilicated design situations, and in situations where the designers are less experienced. Following this idea, a design is formulated as a number of objects that are related to each other, and which interact with each other by sending messages. During the interaction new objects may appear. The hypothesis behind this research is that object-oriented designers think in terms of objects, object relations, and object interactions during the creative phases of the design process.

The DYNAMO approach.
DYNAMO is the name of prototype environment, in which object-oriented design is described in terms of a set of scenarios. A scenario is an example of interactions among objects. We are developing a language, and a number of concepts that allow us to build and explore scenarios. As an important branch of this work, we are investigating how elements of static models can be extracted from scenarios. More concretely, we are attempting to derive outlines of classes and methods from scenarios. The tools in DYNAMO are also in focus in this research. The majority of the tools are browsers, which allows the designer to construct, modifiy and examine scenarios in a number of different ways. In addition, DYNAMO makes it possible to formulate scenarios as interaction diagrams, in the style of UML sequence diagrams.

Research issues.

The DYNAMO environment.
We are building a prototype of DYNAMO in Allegro Common Lisp for Windows on a PC.

As part of the material below, we we provide a number of screen shots of the DYNAMO tools.


Papers, reports and other material.

In the following list the new material is listed before older material.


Kurt Nørmark
normark@cs.auc.dk
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University
Denmark