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 footprints of join points : the blueprint approach

Aspect-oriented techniques are widely used to better modularize object-oriented programs by introducing crosscutting concerns in a safe and non-invasive way, i.e., aspectoriented mechanisms better address the modularization of functionality that orthogonally crosscuts the implementation of the application. Unfortunately, as noted by several researchers, most of the current aspect-oriented approaches are too coupled with the application code, and this fact hinders the concerns separability and consequently their re-usability since each aspect is strictly tailored on the base application. Moreover, the join points (i.e., locations affected by a crosscutting concerns) actually are defined at the operation level. It implies that the possible set of join points includes every operation (e.g., method invocations) that the system performs. Whereas, in many contexts we wish to define aspects that are expected to work at the statement level, i.e., by considering as a join point every point between two generic statements (i.e., lines of code). In this paper, we present our approach, called Blueprint, to overcome the abovementioned limitations of the current aspect-oriented approaches. The Blueprint consists of a new aspect-oriented programming language based on modeling the join point selection mechanism at a high-level of abstraction to decouple aspects from the application code. To this regard, we adopt a high-level pattern-based join point model, where join points are described by join point blueprints, i.e., behavioral patterns describing where the join points should be found

Panorama - a software maintenance tool

Much of the effort in software maintenance is spent on finding relevant information and on program comprehension. Of the several challenges encountered during this process, some are: a) inadequate documentation, b) the developer doing the maintenance activity may not be the one who actually developed it and may be unfamiliar with the application domain (in addition to the unfamiliar code), c) information overload, and d) the relevant code may be scattered across multiple files of different types making it harder to find. Existing documentation in the form of Javadoc is inadequate in providing a global view of the working of the software. Panorama, a java based Eclipse plug-in, was developed to facilitate maintenance activities by providing mechanisms to document and to view expert knowledge and relevant code in the form of a concern. Some features of Panorama are: a code tracing feature that allows the expert to quickly find (so he can document it) lines of code executed in carrying out a function, a concern management feature that allows the expert to create and organize concern information in a hierarchical manner, a concern visualization and context management feature that helps the maintainer to handle information overload by allowing him to switch between contexts, an enhanced user-interface that helps the maintainer to easily navigate between relevant contexts and codes. Panorama also provides a Javadoc -like documentation of cross-cutting concerns that supplement existing Javadoc documentation to provide comprehensive information about the software. In a case study done to validate the usefulness of our tool, Panorama was used to document the SAVER software (a VB.NET based fairly large GIS software with 26,704 executable lines of code that is being actively used by the Iowa Department of Transportation to analyze automobile crashes over a period of time). SAVER has been undergoing continual bug-fixes and enhancement activities - and preliminary studies indicate that the supplementary documentation provided by Panorama has proven beneficial

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

A heuristic-based approach to code-smell detection

Encapsulation and data hiding are central tenets of the object oriented paradigm. Deciding what data and behaviour to form into a class and where to draw the line between its public and private details can make the difference between a class that is an understandable, flexible and reusable abstraction and one which is not. This decision is a difficult one and may easily result in poor encapsulation which can then have serious implications for a number of system qualities. It is often hard to identify such encapsulation problems within large software systems until they cause a maintenance problem (which is usually too late) and attempting to perform such analysis manually can also be tedious and error prone. Two of the common encapsulation problems that can arise as a consequence of this decomposition process are data classes and god classes. Typically, these two problems occur together – data classes are lacking in functionality that has typically been sucked into an over-complicated and domineering god class. This paper describes the architecture of a tool which automatically detects data and god classes that has been developed as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The technique has been evaluated in a controlled study on two large open source systems which compare the tool results to similar work by Marinescu, who employs a metrics-based approach to detecting such features. The study provides some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the two approache

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation

Supporting Text Retrieval Query Formulation In Software Engineering

The text found in software artifacts captures important information. Text Retrieval (TR) techniques have been successfully used to leverage this information. Despite their advantages, the success of TR techniques strongly depends on the textual queries given as input. When poorly chosen queries are used, developers can waste time investigating irrelevant results. The quality of a query indicates the relevance of the results returned by TR in response to the query and can give an indication if the results are worth investigating or a reformulation of the query should be sought instead. Knowing the quality of the query could lead to time saved when irrelevant results are returned. However, the only way to determine if a query led to the wanted artifacts is by manually inspecting the list of results. This dissertation introduces novel approaches to measure and predict the quality of queries automatically in the context of SE tasks, based on a set of statistical properties of the queries. The approaches are evaluated for the task of concept location in source code. The results reveal that the proposed approaches are able to accurately capture and predict the quality of queries for SE tasks supported by TR. When a query has low quality, the developer can reformulate it and improve it. However, this is just as hard as formulating the query in the first place. This dissertation presents two approaches for partial and complete automation of the query reformulation process. The semi-automatic approach relies on developer feedback about the relevance of TR results and uses this information to automatically reformulate the query. The automatic approach learns and applies the best reformulation approach for a query and relies on a set of training queries and their statistical properties to achieve this. Both approaches are evaluated for concept location and the results show that the techniques are able to improve the results of the original queries in the majority of the cases. We expect that on the long run the proposed approaches will contribute directly to the reduction of developer effort and implicitly the reduction of software evolution costs