Software engineering is a composite of data and rules about how those data are composed, presented to various users, and transformed as software development proceeds. An appropriate computer-aided software engineering environment must easily handle data and rules. Currently available commercial programming languages and database management systems tend to be able to handle either data or rules well, but not both simultaneously. Using a standard RDBMS and an open architecture would allow CASE tools to be defined as sets of schemas and semantic rules. Development would be defined as sets of transformational rules. The automatic nature of this approach improves the reliability of developed software and decreases the time and cost of it. Feasibility of the approach will be established by expanding a previously initiated example application. The example will span all views including development and implementation phases. The requisite syntactic, and project constraints will be identified. A constraint language syntax will be specified. Two areas of potential commercialization exist: (i) an extended constraint subsystem, and (ii) individual CASE methodology tool rule bases.
