Embedding Spatial Software Visualization in the IDE: an Exploratory Study

Software visualization can be of great use for understanding and exploring a software system in an intuitive manner. Spatial representation of software is a promising approach of increasing interest. However, little is known about how developers interact with spatial visualizations that are embedded in the IDE. In this paper, we present a pilot study that explores the use of Software Cartography for program comprehension of an unknown system. We investigated whether developers establish a spatial memory of the system, whether clustering by topic offers a sound base layout, and how developers interact with maps. We report our results in the form of observations, hypotheses, and implications. Key findings are a) that developers made good use of the map to inspect search results and call graphs, and b) that developers found the base layout surprising and often confusing. We conclude with concrete advice for the design of embedded software maps.Comment: To appear in proceedings of SOFTVIS 2010 conferenc

Activity Report 2012. Project-Team RMOD. Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution

Activity Report 2012 Project-Team RMOD Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolutio

Assessing the Quality of your Software with MoQam

International audienceOver the last decade, the need for quality in software has increased. Several quality models have been proposed [4, 6, 11]. These mod- els emphasize the need to have quality checks while developing a software program. As far as we are aware of, no model to assess quality of existing software have reached a significant acceptance. This paper describes the Qualixo quality model. Qualixo is an open-source quality model developed by several companies and pushed further in the context of the Squale research project. Ac- cording to Marinescu and Ratiu [9], Qualixo can be classified as a Factor-Criteria-Metrics quality model. Qualixo is being applied in large companies such as AirFrance or PSA. It uses measurements to assess software quality. These measurements cover a number of different aspects of a software, including specification accuracy, programming rules, and test coverage. Qualixo has been origi- nally implemented on top of Eclipse. In this paper we present Mo- Qam (Moose Quality Assessment Model), the implementation of the Qualixo quality model in the Moose open-source reengineering environment

Modular Moose: A new generation software reverse engineering environment

Advanced reverse engineering tools are required to cope with the complexity of software systems and the specific requirements of numerous different tasks (re-architecturing, migration, evolution). Consequently, reverse engineering tools should adapt to a wide range of situations. Yet, because they require a large infrastructure investment, being able to reuse these tools is key. Moose is a reverse engineering environment answering these requirements. While Moose started as a research project 20 years ago, it is also used in industrial projects, exposing itself to all these difficulties. In this paper we present ModMoose, the new version of Moose. ModMoose revolves around a new meta-model, modular and extensible; a new toolset of generic tools (query module, visualization engine, ...); and an open architecture supporting the synchronization and interaction of tools per task. With ModMoose, tool developers can develop specific meta-models by reusing existing elementary concepts, and dedicated reverse engineering tools that can interact with the existing ones

Project-Team RMoD 2013 Activity Report

Activity Report 2013 Project-Team RMOD Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolutio

Visually localizing design problems with disharmony maps

Assessing the quality of software design is difficult, as “design” is expressed through guidelines and heuristics, not rigorous rules. One successful approach to assess design quality is based on de-tection strategies, which are metrics-based composed logical condi-tions, by which design fragments with specific properties are de-tected in the source code. Such detection strategies, when exe-cuted on large software systems usually return large sets of arti-facts, which potentially exhibit one or more “design disharmonies”, which are then inspected manually, a cumbersome activity. In this article we present disharmony maps, a visualization-based approach to locate such flawed software artifacts in large systems. We display the whole system using a 3D visualization technique based on a city metaphor. We enrich such visualizations with the results returned by a number of detection strategies, and thus render both the static structure and the design problems that affect a subject system. We evaluate our approach on a number of open-source Java systems and report on our findings

A Unified Approach to Automatic Testing of Architectural Constraints

Abstract—Architectural decisions are often encoded in the form of constraints and guidelines. Non-functional requirements can be ensured by checking the conformance of the implemen-tation against this kind of invariant. Conformance checking is often a costly and error-prone process that involves the use of multiple tools, differing in effectiveness, complexity and scope of applicability. To reduce the overall effort entailed by this activity, we propose a novel approach that supports verification of human-readable declarative rules through the use of adapted off-the-shelf tools. Our approach consists of a rule specification DSL, called Dictō, and a tool coordination framework, called Probō. The approach has been implemented in a soon to be evaluated prototype. I

Comparison Study and Review on Object-Oriented Metrics

The best elucidations to software development problems are regularly touted as object-oriented processes. The popularity of object-oriented design metrics is essential in software engineering for measuring the software complexity, estimating size, quality and project efforts. There are various approaches through which we can find the software cost estimation and predicates on various kinds of deliverable items. Object-oriented metrics assures to reduce cost and the maintenance effort by serving as early predictors to estimate software faults. Such an early quantification augments the quality of the final software. This paper reviews object-oriented metrics. A comparison table is maintained via which we can analyze the difference between all the object-oriented metrics effectively

Parsing for agile modeling

In order to analyze software systems, it is necessary to model them. Static software models are commonly imported by parsing source code and related data. Unfortunately, building custom parsers for most programming languages is a non-trivial endeavour. This poses a major bottleneck for analyzing software systems programmed in languages for which importers do not already exist. Luckily, initial software models do not require detailed parsers, so it is possible to start analysis with a coarse-grained importer, which is then gradually refined. In this paper we propose an approach to "agile modeling" that exploits island grammars to extract initial coarse-grained models, parser combinators to enable gradual refinement of model importers, and various heuristics to recognize language structure, keywords and other language artifacts