Metamodeling editor as a front end tool for a CASE shell

Customizable Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools, often called CASE shells, are penetrating in the market. CASE shells provide a flexible environment to support a variety of information systems development methods. CASE shells are often cumbersome to use and in practice few people can model and implement methods in them. To overcome these problems we have developed a graphical metamodeling environment called MetaEdit and a method modeling interface to the CASE shell RAMATIC. Using this interface the methodology engineer can develop graphical models in RAMATIC's model definition language and then easily generate the resource files that control the operations of RAMATIC. MetaEdit is used as a graphical front end tool to develop, fast and in user-friendly manner, method models that can then be supported using RAMATIC. In this paper we shortly present the MetaEdit tool and then describe how the interface operates by illustrating how a new method for RAMATIC is defined using MetaEdit's interface tool. The defined method is called TEMPORA-ER.