Development of a case tool to support decision based software development

A summary of the accomplishments of the research over the past year are presented. Achievements include: made demonstrations with DHC, a prototype supporting decision based software development (DBSD) methodology, for Paramax personnel at ODU; met with Paramax personnel to discuss DBSD issues, the process of integrating DBSD and Refinery and the porting process model; completed and submitted a paper describing DBSD paradigm to IFIP '92; completed and presented a paper describing the approach for software reuse at the Software Reuse Workshop in April 1993; continued to extend DHC with a project agenda, facility necessary for a better project management; completed a primary draft of the re-engineering process model for porting; created a logging form to trace all the activities involved in the process of solving the reengineering problem, and developed a primary chart with the problems involved by the reengineering process

A Machine Learning Technique for Abstraction of Modules in Legacy System and Assigning them on Multicore Machines Using and Controlling p-threads

Hardware and Software technology has undergone a sea-of-change in recent past. Hardware technology has moved from single-core to multi-core machine, thus capable of executing multi-task at the same time. But traditional software’s (Legacy system) are still in use today in business world. It is not easy to replace them with new software system as they carry loads of knowledge, business value with them. Also, to build new software system by taking the requirements afresh involves lot of resources in terms of skilled human resources, time and financial resources. At last the customer may not have confidence in this new software. Instead of building a new software, an attempt is made to develop a semi-automated methodology by learning about the program itself (machine learning about the program) to abstract the independent modules present in the same abstraction level (implementation level) and recode the legacy program (single threaded program) into multi-threaded parallel program. A case study program is considered and execution time is noted and analyzed for both the original program and reengineered program on a multi-core machine

Government-to-Government E-Government: A Case Study of a Federal Financial Program

The problem with the study of the concept of electronic government (e-Gov) is that scholars in the field have not adequately explored various dimensions ofthe concept. Literature on e-Gov is replete with works on the form of government to consumer e-Gov. Much less work had been done on the government to government (G2G) e-Gov. This qualitative case study was predicated on the concepts of intergovernmental relations and intergovernmental management, and it sought to fill the gap in the literature by providing a clear understanding of G2G e-Gov by exploring a federal program in the United States. The central research question determined how G2G e-Gov enhanced accountability, efficiency, and public service value. Data were collected using face to face and email interviews, documents, and archival data. Data were analyzed with a modified content analysis technique. Findings from the study indicated that improvements in communication, process, technology, and legislative proposals are linked to programmatic success in G2G e-Gov. The study has implications for social change as the knowledge of G2G e-Gov is useful to governments because of its emphasis on accountability, efficiency, collaboration, and information sharing. It also has the potential to assist public policy officials and academics to better understand the importance of G2G e-Gov for public service delivery, and help developing countries in their e-Gov implementations

Software maintenance by program transformation in a wide spectrum language

This thesis addresses the software maintenance problem of extracting high-level designs from code. The investigated solution is to use a mathematically-based formal program transformation system. The resulting tool, the Maintainer's Assistant, is based on Ward's [177] WSL (wide spectrum language) and method of proving program equivalence. The problems addressed include: how to reverse engineer from code alone (the only reliable source of information about a program [158]), how to express program transformations within the system, what kinds of transformations should be incorporated, how to make the tool simple to use, how to perform abstraction and how to create a tool suitable for use with large programs. Using the Maintainer's Assistant, the program code is automatically translated into WSL and the transformations, although tested for valid applicability by the system, are interactively applied by the user. Notable features include a mathematical simplifier, a large flexible transformation catalogue and, significantly, the use of an extension of WSL, A4etaWSL, for representing the transformations. MetaWSL expands WSL by incorporating a variety of extensions, including: program editing statements, pattern matching and template filling functions, symbolic mathematics and logic functions, statements for moving within the program’s syntax tree and statements for repeating an operation at each node of the tree. Using MetaWSL, 80% of the 601 transformations can be expressed in less than 20 program statements. The Maintainer's Assistant has been used on a wide variety of examples of up to several thousand lines, including commercial software written in IBM 370 assembler. It has been possible to transform initially unstructured programs into a hierarchy of procedures, facilitating subsequent design recovery. These results show that program transformation is a viable method of renovating old (370 assembler) code in a cost elective way, and that MetaWSL provides an effective basis for clearly and concisely expressing the required transformations

Data re-engineering using formal transformations

This thesis presents and analyses a solution to the problem of formally re- engineering program data structures, allowing new representations of a program to be developed. The work is based around Ward's theory of program transformations which uses a Wide Spectrum Language, WSL, whose semantics were specially developed for use in proof of program transformations. The re-engineered code exhibits equivalent functionality to the original but differs in the degree of data abstraction and representation. Previous transformational re-engineering work has concentrated upon control flow restructuring, which has highlighted a lack of support for data restructuring in the maintainer's tool-set. Problems have been encountered during program transformation due to the lack of support for data re-engineering. A lack of strict data semantics and manipulation capabilities has left the maintainer unable to produce optimally re-engineered solutions. It has also hindered the migration of programs into other languages because it has not been possible to convert data structures into an appropriate form in the target language. The main contribution of the thesis is the Data Re-Engineering and Abstraction Mechanism (DREAM) which allows theories about type equivalence to be represented and used in a re-engineering environment. DREAM is based around the technique of "ghosting", a way of introducing different representations of data, which provides the theoretical underpinning of the changes applied to the program. A second major contribution is the introduction of data typing into the WSL language. This allows DREAM to be integrated into the existing transformation theories within WSL. These theoretical extensions of the original work have been shown to be practically viable by implementation within a prototype transformation tool, the Maintainer's Assistant. The extended tool has been used to re-engineer heavily modified, commercial legacy code. The results of this have shown that useful re-engineering work can be performed and that DREAM integrates well with existing control flow transformations

The use of non-formal information in reverse engineering and software reuse

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Within the field of software maintenance, both reverse engineering and software reuse have been suggested as ways of salvaging some of the investment made in software that is now out of date. One goal that is shared by both reverse engineering and reuse is a desire to be able to redescribe source code, that is to produce higher level descriptions of existing code. The fundamental theme of this thesis is that from a maintenance perspective, source code should be considered primarily as a text. This emphasizes its role as a medium for communication between humans rather than as a medium for human-computer communication. Characteristic of this view is the need to incorporate the analysis of non-formal information, such as comments and identifier names, when developing tools to redescribe code. Many existing tools fail to do this. To justify this text-based view of source code, an investigation into the possible use of non-formal information to index pieces of source code was undertaken. This involved attempting to assign descriptors that represent the code's function to pieces of source code from IBM's CICS project. The results of this investigation support the view that the use of nonformal information can be of practical value in redescribing source code. However, the results fail to suggest that using non-formal information will overcome any of the major difficulties associated with developing tools to redescribe code. This is used to suggest future directions for research