Prototyping of Parallel and Distributed Object-Oriented Systems: The PDC Model and its Environment

From an abstract point of view, the main problems of software engineering for parallel and distributed systems are similar to systems where concurrency and distribution play no role. On the one hand, it is equally difficult to define the requirements for a system in such a complete, correct and concise form that we can separate requirement analysis activities from the implementation. As in other systems, requirements definitions often prove incomplete and inconsistent; when detected late in the implementation, this induces painful costs. Another reason for expensive software is the lack of quality of the implementation itself in terms of flexibility, extensibility and reusability. As in other application domains, prototyping and object-oriented software technology provide a suitable means to address these problems in the area of distributed and parallel systems. Prototyping aims at a more complete and correct system specification and object-oriented programming supports the construction of more extensible and reusable software.