102,615 research outputs found

    Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development

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    Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18

    Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

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    Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

    Communication difficulties following right hemisphere stroke : applying evidence to clinical management

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    Following reports in the 1960s that language may be affected by right hemisphere (RH) lesions, many limitations to effective communication in the right hemisphere damaged (RHD) population have been described and evidenced. However, stereotypical portrayals and descriptions of carefully selected cases may be misleading as to the extent of communication deficits. In many of the parameters in which RHD patients are presented as typically impaired, e.g. discourse skills, a less severe picture may emerge where data from the non-brain damaged (NBD) population are considered, with age and education variables controlled. Subsequent to RHD, some people show deficit on some communication measures, but many of these communication behaviours are also present in some NBD adults. Thus diagnosis of deficit must be made with reference both to the healthy peer population and the individual's pre-lesion behaviour. The authors' right RH stroke research programme includes studies of incidence of communication deficit, comparisons of RHD and NBD groups in various spoken discourse and comprehension tasks, comparison of RHD groups of different ages, detailed analysis of topic within discourse in RHD and NBD groups, family members' views of communication behaviour following RHD, and the natural course of communication change during the first year after RH stroke. The findings from several studies are summarised and used as the basis for management recommendations, which may guide future outcome research. There is an urgent need for the evaluation of communication management programmes, to determine whether therapists may with confidence offer an effective intervention service to those people whose communication skills are affected by RHD

    An evaluation framework to drive future evolution of a research prototype

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    The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR) requires evaluation to confirm its suitability as a development environment for distributed software engineers. The evaluation will take note of several factors including usability of OSCAR as a stand-alone system, scalability and maintainability of the system and novel features not provided by existing artefact management systems. Additionally, the evaluation design attempts to address some of the omissions (due to time constraints) from the industrial partner evaluations. This evaluation is intended to be a prelude to the evaluation of the awareness support being added to OSCAR; thus establishing a baseline to which the effects of awareness support may be compared

    The Stores Model of Code Cognition

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    Program comprehension is perhaps one of the oldest topics within the psychology of programming. It addresses a central issue: how programmers work with and manipulate source code to construct effective software systems. Models can play an important role in understanding the challenges developers and engineers contend with. This paper presents a model of program comprehension, or code cognition, which has been derived from literature found within the disciplines of computing and psychology. Drawing on direct experimentation, this paper argues that a model of code cognition should take account of the visual, spatial and linguistic abilities of developers. The strengths and weaknesses of this model are discussed and further research directions presented
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