Legacy Software Restructuring: Analyzing a Concrete Case

Software re-modularization is an old preoccupation of reverse engineering research. The advantages of a well structured or modularized system are well known. Yet after so much time and efforts, the field seems unable to come up with solutions that make a clear difference in practice. Recently, some researchers started to question whether some basic assumptions of the field were not overrated. The main one consists in evaluating the high-cohesion/low-coupling dogma with metrics of unknown relevance. In this paper, we study a real structuring case (on the Eclipse platform) to try to better understand if (some) existing metrics would have helped the software engineers in the task. Results show that the cohesion and coupling metrics used in the experiment did not behave as expected and would probably not have helped the maintainers reach there goal. We also measured another possible restructuring which is to decrease the number of cyclic dependencies between modules. Again, the results did not meet expectations

Bioconductor: open software development for computational biology and bioinformatics.

The Bioconductor project is an initiative for the collaborative creation of extensible software for computational biology and bioinformatics. The goals of the project include: fostering collaborative development and widespread use of innovative software, reducing barriers to entry into interdisciplinary scientific research, and promoting the achievement of remote reproducibility of research results. We describe details of our aims and methods, identify current challenges, compare Bioconductor to other open bioinformatics projects, and provide working examples

Design and Achievement of User Interface Automation Testing of Linux Based on Element Tree of DogTail

As Linux gets more popular around the world, the advantage of the open source on software makes people do automated UI test by unified testing framework. UI software testing can guarantee the rationality of User Interface of Linux and accuracy of the UI’s widgets. In order to set free from fuzzy and repeated manual testing, and improve efficiency, this paper achieves automation testing of UI under Linux, and proposes a method to identify and test UI widgets under Linux, which is according to element tree of DogTail automaton testing framework. It achieves automation test of UI under Linux. According to this method, Aiming at the product of Red Hat Subscription Manager under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it designs the automation test plan of this series of product’s dialogs. After many tests, it is indicated that this plan can identify UI widgets accurately and rationally, describe the structure of software clearly, avoid software errors and improve efficiency of the software. Simultaneously, it also can be used in the internationalization testing for checking translation during software internationalization

A Systematic Aspect-Oriented Refactoring and Testing Strategy, and its Application to JHotDraw

Aspect oriented programming aims at achieving better modularization for a system's crosscutting concerns in order to improve its key quality attributes, such as evolvability and reusability. Consequently, the adoption of aspect-oriented techniques in existing (legacy) software systems is of interest to remediate software aging. The refactoring of existing systems to employ aspect-orientation will be considerably eased by a systematic approach that will ensure a safe and consistent migration. In this paper, we propose a refactoring and testing strategy that supports such an approach and consider issues of behavior conservation and (incremental) integration of the aspect-oriented solution with the original system. The strategy is applied to the JHotDraw open source project and illustrated on a group of selected concerns. Finally, we abstract from the case study and present a number of generic refactorings which contribute to an incremental aspect-oriented refactoring process and associate particular types of crosscutting concerns to the model and features of the employed aspect language. The contributions of this paper are both in the area of supporting migration towards aspect-oriented solutions and supporting the development of aspect languages that are better suited for such migrations.Comment: 25 page

A Case Study in Matching Service Descriptions to Implementations in an Existing System

A number of companies are trying to migrate large monolithic software systems to Service Oriented Architectures. A common approach to do this is to first identify and describe desired services (i.e., create a model), and then to locate portions of code within the existing system that implement the described services. In this paper we describe a detailed case study we undertook to match a model to an open-source business application. We describe the systematic methodology we used, the results of the exercise, as well as several observations that throw light on the nature of this problem. We also suggest and validate heuristics that are likely to be useful in partially automating the process of matching service descriptions to implementations.Comment: 20 pages, 19 pdf figure

A comparison of two SPLE tools : Pure::Variants and Clafer tools

In software product line engineering (SPLE), parts of developed software is made variable in order to be able to build a whole range of software products at the same time. This is widely known to have a number of potential benefits such as saving costs when the product line is large enough. However, managing variability in software introduces challenges that are not well addressed by tools used in conventional software engineering, and specialized tools are needed. Research questions: 1) What are the most important requirements for SPLE tools for a small-to-medium sized organisation aiming to experiment with SPLE? 2) How well those requirements are met in two specific SPLE tools, Pure::Variants and Clafer tools? 3) How do the studied tools compare against each other when it comes to their suitability for the chosen context (a digital board game platform)? 4) How common requirements for SPL tools can be generalized to be applicable for both graphical and text-based tools? A list of requirements is first obtained from literature and then used as a basis for an experiment where support for each requirement is tried out with both tools. Then a part of an example product line is developed with both tools and the experiences reported on. Both tools were found to support the list of requirements quite well, although there were some usability problems and not everything could be tested due to technical issues. Based on developing the example, both tools were found to have their own strengths and weaknesses probably partly resulting from one being GUI-based and one textual. ACM Computing Classification System (CCS): (1) CCS → Software and its engineering → Software creation and management → Software development techniques → Reusability → Software product lines (2) CCS → Software and its engineering → Software notations and tools → Software configuration management and version control system

The KB paradigm and its application to interactive configuration

The knowledge base paradigm aims to express domain knowledge in a rich formal language, and to use this domain knowledge as a knowledge base to solve various problems and tasks that arise in the domain by applying multiple forms of inference. As such, the paradigm applies a strict separation of concerns between information and problem solving. In this paper, we analyze the principles and feasibility of the knowledge base paradigm in the context of an important class of applications: interactive configuration problems. In interactive configuration problems, a configuration of interrelated objects under constraints is searched, where the system assists the user in reaching an intended configuration. It is widely recognized in industry that good software solutions for these problems are very difficult to develop. We investigate such problems from the perspective of the KB paradigm. We show that multiple functionalities in this domain can be achieved by applying different forms of logical inferences on a formal specification of the configuration domain. We report on a proof of concept of this approach in a real-life application with a banking company. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).Comment: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP