The Modular Approach to Software Construction Operation and Test (MASCOT) is a

software engineering methodology In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software devel ...

developed under the auspices of the

United Kingdom Ministry of Defence The Ministry of Defence (MOD or MoD) is the department responsible for implementing the defence policy set by His Majesty's Government, and is the headquarters of the British Armed Forces. The MOD states that its principal objectives are to ...

starting in the early 1970s at the

Royal Radar Establishment The Royal Radar Establishment was a research centre in Malvern, Worcestershire in the United Kingdom. It was formed in 1953 as the Radar Research Establishment by the merger of the Air Ministry's Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) a ...

and continuing its evolution over the next twenty years. The co-originators of MASCOT wer
Hugo Simpson
and Ken Jackson (currently with

Telelogic Telelogic AB was a software business headquartered in Malmö, Sweden. Telelogic was founded in 1983 as a research and development arm of Televerket, the Swedish department of telecom (now part of TeliaSonera). It was later acquired by IBM Rati ...

). Where most methodologies tend to concentrate on bringing rigour and structure to a software project's functional aspects, MASCOT's primary purpose is to emphasise the ''architectural'' aspects of a project. Its creators purposely avoided saying anything about the functionality of the software being developed, and concentrated on the real-time control and interface definitions between concurrently running processes. MASCOT was successfully used in a number of defence systems, most notably the Rapier ground-to-air missile system of the British Army. Although still in use on systems in the field, it never reached critical success and has been subsequently overshadowed by object oriented design methodologies based on

UML The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. The creation of UML was originally m ...

. A

British Standards Institution The British Standards Institution (BSI) is the national standards body of the United Kingdom. BSI produces technical standards on a wide range of products and services and also supplies certification and standards-related services to busines ...

(BSI) standard was drafted for version 3 of the methodology, but was never ratified. Copies of the draft standard can be still obtained from the BSI.

MASCOT in the field

The UK Ministry of Defence has been the primary user of the MASCOT method through its application in significant military systems, and at one stage mandated its use for new operational systems. Examples include the Rapier missile system, and various Royal Navy Command & Control Systems.

The Future of the Method

MASCOT's principles continue to evolve in the academic community (principally at the DCSC) and the aerospace industry

Matra BAe Dynamics Matra BAe Dynamics was formed in August 1996 by merger of half the missile business of Matra Defense of France and BAe Dynamics (a division of British Aerospace) of the UK and was Europe's largest manufacturer of missiles and UAVs. British Aeros ...

, through research into temporal aspects of software design and the expression of system architectures, most notably in the DORIS (Data-Oriented Requirements Implementation Scheme) method and implementation protocols. Work has also included combining UML and DORIS to provide a richer means of describing complex real-time systems ( Computer Science Research Institute).

References

# MASCOT - A Modular Approach to Software Construction Operation and Test, Royal Radar Establishment, RRE Technical Note No 778, October 1975 # Simpson, H. 1986. The Mascot method. Softw. Eng. J. 1, 3 (May 1986), 103-120. ISSN 0268-6961 # DD 196:1991; Guide for a modular approach to software construction, operation and test (MASCOT), British Standards Institute # Simpson, H. 1994. Architecture for Computer Based Systems. IEEE Workshop on the Engineering of Computer Based Systems, 1994. # Hull MEC, Ewart S, Millar RJ, Hanna JRP. March 2004. Modeling Complex Real-Time and Embedded Systems - The UML and DORIS Combination, Real-Time Systems, Vol. 26, No. 2, 135-159, ISSN 0922-6443

External links

The Official Handbook of Mascot : Version 3.1 : June 1987
Software development process