Development of a comprehensive software engineering environment

The generation of a set of tools for software lifecycle is a recurring theme in the software engineering literature. The development of such tools and their integration into a software development environment is a difficult task because of the magnitude (number of variables) and the complexity (combinatorics) of the software lifecycle process. An initial development of a global approach was initiated in 1982 as the Software Development Workbench (SDW). Continuing efforts focus on tool development, tool integration, human interfacing, data dictionaries, and testing algorithms. Current efforts are emphasizing natural language interfaces, expert system software development associates and distributed environments with Ada as the target language. The current implementation of the SDW is on a VAX-11/780. Other software development tools are being networked through engineering workstations

ODE: ontology-based software development environment

Software tools processing partially common set of data should share an understanding of what these data mean. Since ontologies have been used to express formally a shared understanding of information, we argue that they can be used to improve integration in Software Engineering Environments (SEE). In this paper we discuss an ontology-based approach to improve tool integration and present ODE, an ontology-based SEE.Eje: Ingeniería de Software y Bases de Datos (ISBD)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Process Driven Software Engineering Environments

Software development organizations have begun using Software Engineering Environments (SEEs) with the goal of enhancing the productivity of software developers and improving the quality of software products. The encompassing nature of a SEE means that it is typically very tightly coupled with the way an organization does business. To be most effective, the components of a SEE must be well integrated and the SEE itself must be integrated with the organization. The challenge of tool integration increases considerably when the components of the environment come from different vendors and support varying degrees of “openness”. The challenge of integration with the organization increases in a like manner when the environment must support a variety of different organizations over a long period of time. In addition to these pressures, any SEE must perform well and must “scale” well as the size of the organization changes. This paper proposes basing the Software Engineering Environment on the software development process used in an organization in order to meet the challenges of integration, performance, and scaling. The goals and services of distributed operating systems and Software Engineering Environments are outlined in order to more clearly define their roles. The motivation for using a well defined software development process is established along with the benefits of basing the Software Engineering Environment on the software development process. Components of a SEE that could effectively support the process and provide integration, performance, and scaling benefits are introduced along with an outline of an Ada program used to model the proposed components. The conclusion provides strong support for process driven SEEs, encourages the expansion of the concept into other “environments,” and cautions against literal interpretations of “process integration” that may slow the acceptance of this powerful approach

A layered operational model for describing inter-tool communication in tool integration frameworks

Integration frameworks for building software engineering environments provide at least data, control and presentation integration facilities, together with integration devices which afford access to these facilities by the tools which populate the framework. Typically, an integration device is a specially developed language, or extension to an existing language, in which the integration programmer specifies the desired interactions between the tools comprising the software engineering environment. Surprisingly little effort has been applied to assessing the expressiveness of integration languages, even though the power of such a language limits the level of integration a tool can achieve within the environment. Our work seeks to provide an approach to both assessing and comparing the expressiveness of the integration devices of a range of commercial and research products. The paper presents a layered operational model, based on information structures; this model has been developed for describing the semantics of the inter-tool communication features of integration devices in a precise manner, and in a manner which will facilitate such assessment and comparison

Developing and integrating tools in Eclipse/PCTE

The whole area of software engineering environments is an emerging one. Such environments have become necessary due to the rapid changes which have occurred in the software industry in the last twenty years. The desire is to produce products of high quality and at a reasonable cost. Unfortunately history shows that, in general, software systems rarely met the specific need for which they were developed and were often unreliable, inefficient , poorly documented and required considerable maintenance. One of the main areas of research into increasing both the productivity and the quality of software has been the use of software engineering environments. The area of software engineering environments is a changing one with evolving definitions. What can be stated is that a key objective of software engineering environments is the support of software process from requirements definition through to system maintenance. Such support can only be provided through the development of integrated sets of tools each supporting various aspects of the software development process. In order for tools to be fully integrated and have the same ’look and feel’ it is necessary that they are developed on a common platform, providing all the facilities needed for tool development and integration. Such a platform is the Eclipse tool builder’s kit based on the Portable Common Tool Environment (PCTE). The work in this thesis was based on an evaluation of this development platform for developing and integrating software tools, particularly real-time telecommunications software tools. The work in this thesis was carried out as part of the European Community’s RACE programme. The project was called SPECS 1. The SPECS project is outlined in chapter one of this thesis along with a brief history of the research into software engineering environments to date. The work which I was responsible for involved both the integration of existing toolsets and tools, developed by other partners in the SPECS project, as well as the development of new "native" tools within Eclipse/PCTE. This work was necessary so that the SPECS project could produce an integrated set of tools at the end of its research. It was my job to evaluate the potential of Eclipse/PCTE as a basis for this integration

Integrating interface slicing into software engineering processes

Interface slicing is a tool which was developed to facilitate software engineering. As previously presented, it was described in terms of its techniques and mechanisms. The integration of interface slicing into specific software engineering activities is considered by discussing a number of potential applications of interface slicing. The applications discussed specifically address the problems, issues, or concerns raised in a previous project. Because a complete interface slicer is still under development, these applications must be phrased in future tenses. Nonetheless, the interface slicing techniques which were presented can be implemented using current compiler and static analysis technology. Whether implemented as a standalone tool or as a module in an integrated development or reverse engineering environment, they require analysis no more complex than that required for current system development environments. By contrast, conventional slicing is a methodology which, while showing much promise and intuitive appeal, has yet to be fully implemented in a production language environment despite 12 years of development

ODE: ontology-based software development environment

Software tools processing partially common set of data should share an understanding of what these data mean. Since ontologies have been used to express formally a shared understanding of information, we argue that they can be used to improve integration in Software Engineering Environments (SEE). In this paper we discuss an ontology-based approach to improve tool integration and present ODE, an ontology-based SEE.Eje: Ingeniería de Software y Bases de Datos (ISBD)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Towards a knowledge driven framework for bridging the gap between software and data engineering

In this paper we present a collection of ontologies specifically designed to model the information exchange needs of combined software and data engineering. Effective, collaborative integration of software and big data engineering forWeb-scale systems, is now a crucial technical and economic challenge. This requires new combined data and software engineering processes and tools. Our proposed models have been deployed to enable: tool-chain integration, such as the exchange of data quality reports; cross-domain communication, such as interlinked data and software unit testing; mediation of the system design process through the capture of design intents and as a source of context for model-driven software engineering processes. These ontologies are deployed in webscale, data-intensive, system development environments in both the commercial and academic domains. We exemplify the usage of the suite on case-studies emerging from two complex collaborative software and data engineering scenarios: one from the legal sector and the other from the Social sciences and Humanities domain

Towards a knowledge driven framework for bridging the gap between software and data engineering

In this paper we present a collection of ontologies specifically designed to model the information exchange needs of combined software and data engineering. Effective, collaborative integration of software and big data engineering for Web-scale systems, is now a crucial technical and economic challenge. This requires new combined data and software engineering processes and tools. Our proposed models have been deployed to enable: tool-chain integration, such as the exchange of data quality reports; cross-domain communication, such as interlinked data and software unit testing; mediation of the system design process through the capture of design intents and as a source of context for model-driven software engineering processes. These ontologies are deployed in webscale, data-intensive, system development environments in both the commercial and academic domains. We exemplify the usage of the suite on case-studies emerging from two complex collaborative software and data engineering scenarios: one from the legal sector and the other from the Social sciences and Humanities domain

Interfacing Oz with the PCTE OMS

This paper details our experiment interfacing Oz with the Object Management System (OMS) of PCTE. Oz is a process-centered multi-user software development environment. PCTE is a specification which defines a language independent interface providing support mechanisms for software engineering environments (SEE) populated with CASE tools. Oz is, in theory, a SEE that can be built (or extended) using the services provided by PCTE. Oz historically has had a native OMS component whereas the PCTE OMS is an open data repository with an API for external software tools. Our experiment focused on changing Oz to use the PCTE OMS. This paper describes how several Oz components were changed in order to make the Oz server interface with the PCTE OMS. The resulting system of our experiment is an environment that has process control and integration services provided by Oz, data integration services provided by PCTE, and tool integration services provided by both. We discusses in depth the concurrency control problems that arise in such an environment and their solutions. The PCTE implementation used in our experiment is the Emeraude PCTE V 12.5.1 supplied by Transtar Software Incorporation