An overview of Mirjam and WeaveC

In this chapter, we elaborate on the design of an industrial-strength aspectoriented programming language and weaver for large-scale software development. First, we present an analysis on the requirements of a general purpose aspect-oriented language that can handle crosscutting concerns in ASML software. We also outline a strategy on working with aspects in large-scale software development processes. In our design, we both re-use existing aspect-oriented language abstractions and propose new ones to address the issues that we identified in our analysis. The quality of the code ensured by the realized language and weaver has a positive impact both on maintenance effort and lead-time in the first line software development process. As evidence, we present a short evaluation of the language and weaver as applied today in the software development process of ASML

On the Effect of Semantically Enriched Context Models on Software Modularization

Many of the existing approaches for program comprehension rely on the linguistic information found in source code, such as identifier names and comments. Semantic clustering is one such technique for modularization of the system that relies on the informal semantics of the program, encoded in the vocabulary used in the source code. Treating the source code as a collection of tokens loses the semantic information embedded within the identifiers. We try to overcome this problem by introducing context models for source code identifiers to obtain a semantic kernel, which can be used for both deriving the topics that run through the system as well as their clustering. In the first model, we abstract an identifier to its type representation and build on this notion of context to construct contextual vector representation of the source code. The second notion of context is defined based on the flow of data between identifiers to represent a module as a dependency graph where the nodes correspond to identifiers and the edges represent the data dependencies between pairs of identifiers. We have applied our approach to 10 medium-sized open source Java projects, and show that by introducing contexts for identifiers, the quality of the modularization of the software systems is improved. Both of the context models give results that are superior to the plain vector representation of documents. In some cases, the authoritativeness of decompositions is improved by 67%. Furthermore, a more detailed evaluation of our approach on JEdit, an open source editor, demonstrates that inferred topics through performing topic analysis on the contextual representations are more meaningful compared to the plain representation of the documents. The proposed approach in introducing a context model for source code identifiers paves the way for building tools that support developers in program comprehension tasks such as application and domain concept location, software modularization and topic analysis

Generator-Composition for Aspect-Oriented Domain-Specific Languages

Software systems are complex, as they must cover a diverse set of requirements describing functionality and the environment. Software engineering addresses this complexity with Model-Driven Engineering ( MDE ). MDE utilizes different models and metamodels to specify views and aspects of a software system. Subsequently, these models must be transformed into code and other artifacts, which is performed by generators. Information systems and embedded systems are often used over decades. Over time, they must be modified and extended to fulfill new and changed requirements. These alterations can be triggered by the modeling domain and by technology changes in both the platform and programming languages. In MDE these alterations result in changes of syntax and semantics of metamodels, and subsequently of generator implementations. In MDE, generators can become complex software applications. Their complexity depends on the semantics of source and target metamodels, and the number of involved metamodels. Changes to metamodels and their semantics require generator modifications and can cause architecture and code degradation. This can result in errors in the generator, which have a negative effect on development costs and time. Furthermore, these errors can reduce quality and increase costs in projects utilizing the generator. Therefore, we propose the generator construction and evolution approach GECO, which supports decoupling of generator components and their modularization. GECO comprises three contributions: (a) a method for metamodel partitioning into views, aspects, and base models together with partitioning along semantic boundaries, (b) a generator composition approach utilizing megamodel patterns for generator fragments, which are generators depending on only one source and one target metamodel, (c) an approach to modularize fragments along metamodel semantics and fragment functionality. All three contributions together support modularization and evolvability of generators

Device Cooperation in Ad-hoc Multimedia Ensembles

Users can be overwhelmed by the abundance of functionality that smart ad-hoc environments offer. This thesis investigates how to assist the user in controlling such environments. We present an approach that enables the devices in an ad-hoc environment to cooperatively generate and execute an action sequence to fulfill the user's goals. Device cooperation happens spontaneously and in a completely distributed fashion. In a quantitative user study, we show that users accept the assistance such a system provides even if it is suboptimal.Nutzer von intelligenten Ad-hoc-Umgebungen sind oft überfordert von der Fülle an Funktionalität, die solche Umgebungen bieten. Im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit steht die Frage, wie man Nutzern solcher Umgebungen assistieren kann. Der vorgestellte Ansatz versetzt die Geräte in Ad-hoc-Umgebungen in die Lage, kooperativ eine Aktionssequenz zu generieren und auszuführen, die die Nutzerziele erfüllt. Die Gerätekooperation erfolgt spontan und komplett verteilt. In einer quantitativen Nutzerstudie zeigen wir, dass Nutzer die Assistenz eines solchen Systems akzeptieren, auch wenn sie suboptimal ist

Decentralized Control and Adaptation in Distributed Applications via Web and Semantic Web Technologies

The presented work provides an approach and an implementation for enabling decentralized control in distributed applications composed of heterogeneous components by benefiting from the interoperability provided by the Web stack and relying on semantic technologies for enabling data integration. In particular, the concept of Smart Components enables adaptability at runtime through an adaptation layer and is complemented by a reference architecture as well as a prototypical implementation

Proceedings of the Deduktionstreffen 2019

The annual meeting Deduktionstreffen is the prime activity of the Special Interest Group on Deduction Systems (FG DedSys) of the AI Section of the German Society for Informatics (GI-FBKI). It is a meeting with a familiar, friendly atmosphere, where everyone interested in deduction can report on their work in an informal setting

Derivation and consistency checking of models in early software product line engineering

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia InformáticaSoftware Product Line Engineering (SPLE) should offer the ability to express the derivation of product-specific assets, while checking for their consistency. The derivation of product-specific assets is possible using general-purpose programming languages in combination with techniques such as conditional compilation and code generation. On the other hand, consistency checking can be achieved through consistency rules in the form of architectural and design guidelines, programming conventions and well-formedness rules. Current approaches present four shortcomings: (1) focus on code derivation only, (2) ignore consistency problems between the variability model and other complementary specification models used in early SPLE, (3) force developers to learn new, difficult to master, languages to encode the derivation of assets, and (4) offer no tool support. This dissertation presents solutions that contribute to tackle these four shortcomings. These solutions are integrated in the approach Derivation and Consistency Checking of models in early SPLE (DCC4SPL) and its corresponding tool support. The two main components of our approach are the Variability Modelling Language for Requirements(VML4RE), a domain-specific language and derivation infrastructure, and the Variability Consistency Checker (VCC), a verification technique and tool. We validate DCC4SPL demonstrating that it is appropriate to find inconsistencies in early SPL model-based specifications and to specify the derivation of product-specific models.European Project AMPLE, contract IST-33710; Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - SFRH/BD/46194/2008