Augmenting IDEs with Runtime Information for Software Maintenance

Object-oriented language features such as inheritance, abstract types, late-binding, or polymorphism lead to distributed and scattered code, rendering a software system hard to understand and maintain. The integrated development environment (IDE), the primary tool used by developers to maintain software systems, usually purely operates on static source code and does not reveal dynamic relationships between distributed source artifacts, which makes it difficult for developers to understand and navigate software systems. Another shortcoming of today's IDEs is the large amount of information with which they typically overwhelm developers. Large software systems encompass several thousand source artifacts such as classes and methods. These static artifacts are presented by IDEs in views such as trees or source editors. To gain an understanding of a system, developers have to open many such views, which leads to a workspace cluttered with different windows or tabs. Navigating through the code or maintaining a working context is thus difficult for developers working on large software systems. In this dissertation we address the question how to augment IDEs with dynamic information to better navigate scattered code while at the same time not overwhelming developers with even more information in the IDE views. We claim that by first reducing the amount of information developers have to deal with, we are subsequently able to embed dynamic information in the familiar source perspectives of IDEs to better comprehend and navigate large software spaces. We propose means to reduce or mitigate the information by highlighting relevant source elements, by explicitly representing working context, and by automatically housekeeping the workspace in the IDE. We then improve navigation of scattered code by explicitly representing dynamic collaboration and software features in the static source perspectives of IDEs. We validate our claim by conducting empirical experiments with developers and by analyzing recorded development sessions

OGAN : Visualizing Object Interaction Scenarios Based on Dynamic Interaction Context

Program Comprehension, 2009. ICPC '09. IEEE 17th International Conference onDate of Conference:17-19 May 2009Conference Location :Vancouver, B

Evaluation of formal IDEs for human-machine interface design and analysis: the case of CIRCUS and PVSio-web

Critical human-machine interfaces are present in many systems including avionics systems and medical devices. Use error is a concern in these systems both in terms of hardware panels and input devices, and the software that drives the interfaces. Guaranteeing safe usability, in terms of buttons, knobs and displays is now a key element in the overall safety of the system. New integrated development environments (IDEs) based on formal methods technologies have been developed by the research community to support the design and analysis of high-confidence human-machine interfaces. To date, little work has focused on the comparison of these particular types of formal IDEs. This paper compares and evaluates two state-of-the-art toolkits: CIRCUS, a model-based development and analysis tool based on Petri net extensions, and PVSio-web, a prototyping toolkit based on the PVS theorem proving system.This work is partially supported by: Project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000016, financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF); Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (CNPq) PhD scholarship

Spiraling Toward Usability: An Integrated Design Environment and Management System

Decades of innovation in designing usable (and unusable) interfaces have resulted in a plethora of guidelines, usability engineering methods, and other design tools. However, novice developers often have difficulty selecting and utilizing theory-based design tools in a coherent design process. This work introduces an integrated design environment and knowledge management system, LINK-UP. The central design record (CDR) module, provides tools to enable a guided, coherent development process. The CDR aims to prevent breakdowns occurring between design and evaluation phases both within the development team and during design knowledge reuse processes. We report on results from three case studies illustrating novice designers use of LINK-UP. A design knowledge IDE incorporating a CDR can help novice developers craft interfaces in a methodical fashion, while applying, verifying, and producing reusable design knowledge. Although LINK-UP supports a specific design domain, our IDE approach can transfer to other domains

10301 Executive Summary and Abstracts Collection -- Service Value Networks

From 25.07.2010 to 30.07.2010, the Perspectives Workshop 10301 ``Perspectives Workshop: Service Value Networks \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Rethinking Consistency Management in Real-time Collaborative Editing Systems

Networked computer systems offer much to support collaborative editing of shared documents among users. Increasing concurrent access to shared documents by allowing multiple users to contribute to and/or track changes to these shared documents is the goal of real-time collaborative editing systems (RTCES); yet concurrent access is either limited in existing systems that employ exclusive locking or concurrency control algorithms such as operational transformation (OT) may be employed to enable concurrent access. Unfortunately, such OT based schemes are costly with respect to communication and computation. Further, existing systems are often specialized in their functionality and require users to adopt new, unfamiliar software to enable collaboration. This research discusses our work in improving consistency management in RTCES. We have developed a set of deadlock-free multi-granular dynamic locking algorithms and data structures that maximize concurrent access to shared documents while minimizing communication cost. These algorithms provide a high level of service for concurrent access to the shared document and integrate merge-based or OT-based consistency maintenance policies locally among a subset of the users within a subsection of the document – thus reducing the communication costs in maintaining consistency. Additionally, we have developed client-server and P2P implementations of our hierarchical document management algorithms. Simulations results indicate that our approach achieves significant communication and computation cost savings. We have also developed a hierarchical reduction algorithm that can minimize the space required of RTCES, and this algorithm may be pipelined through our document tree. Further, we have developed an architecture that allows for a heterogeneous set of client editing software to connect with a heterogeneous set of server document repositories via Web services. This architecture supports our algorithms and does not require client or server technologies to be modified – thus it is able to accommodate existing, favored editing and repository tools. Finally, we have developed a prototype benchmark system of our architecture that is responsive to users’ actions and minimizes communication costs

Enhancing System Realisation in Formal Model Development

Software for mission-critical systems is sometimes analysed using formal specification to increase the chances of the system behaving as intended. When sufficient insights into the system have been obtained from the formal analysis, the formal specification is realised in the form of a software implementation. One way to realise the system's software is by automatically generating it from the formal specification -- a technique referred to as code generation. However, in general it is difficult to make guarantees about the correctness of the generated code -- especially while requiring automation of the steps involved in realising the formal specification. This PhD dissertation investigates ways to improve the automation of the steps involved in realising and validating a system based on a formal specification. The approach aims to develop properly designed software tools which support the integration of formal methods tools into the software development life cycle, and which leverage the formal specification in the subsequent validation of the system. The tools developed use a new code generation infrastructure that has been built as part of this PhD project and implemented in the Overture tool -- a formal methods tool that supports the Vienna Development Method. The development of the code generation infrastructure has involved the re-design of the software architecture of Overture. The new architecture brings forth the reuse and extensibility features of Overture to take into account the needs and requirements of software extensions targeting Overture. The tools developed in this PhD project have successfully supported three case studies from externally funded projects. The feedback received from the case study work has further helped improve the code generation infrastructure and the tools built using it

User Experience for Model-Driven Engineering : Challenges and Future Directions

Since its infancy, Model Driven Engineering (MDE) research has primarily focused on technical issues. Although it is becoming increasingly common for MDE research papers to evaluate their theoretical and practical solutions, extensive usability studies are still uncommon. We observe a scarcity of User eXperience (UX)-related research in the MDE community, and posit that many existing tools and languages have room for improvement with respect to UX [26], [44], [37], where UX is a key focus area in the software development industry. We consider this gap a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed by the community if MDE is to gain widespread use. In this vision paper, we explore how and where UX fits into MDE by considering motivating use cases that revolve around different dimensions of integration: model integration, tool integration, and integration between process and tool support. Based on the literature and our collective experience in research and industrial collaborations, we propose future directions for addressing these challenges

実世界入出力を伴うプログラムの画像表現を用いた開発支援手法

学位の種別:課程博士University of Tokyo(東京大学