ABSTRACT KenyaEclipse: Learning to Program in Eclipse

A fundamental part of a Computer Science degree is learning to program. Rather than starting students on a full commercial language, we favour using a dedicated “teaching language ” to introduce programming concepts. At the same time, we want to introduce students to popular tools that assist in the software development process. However, up until now our teaching language, Kenya, has not been supported by professional IDEs. Therefore, we have been unable to progress smoothly from first principles to the state of the art within one environment. We present work that integrates the Kenya language into the Eclipse environment. Students can now become familiar with the major features of a professional IDE while learning to program, and experience a smooth transition to commercial languages within the same environment. One of the hardest things to teach students is good programming style. Compilers reveal syntactic and type errors, but do not analyse style. We have harnessed as-you-type code checking, as seen in Eclipse’s Java development tools, to provide advice on program style as well as correctness

Predictable dynamic software architectures

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

System architecture: the context for scenario-based model synthesis

Constructing rigorous models for analysing the behaviour of concurrent and distributed systems is a complex task. Our aim is to facilitate model construction. Scenarios provide simple, intuitive, example based descriptions of the behaviour of component instances in the context of a simplified architecture instance. The specific architecture instance is generally chosen to provide sufficient context to indicate the expected behaviour of particular instances of component types to be used in the real system. Existing synthesis techniques provide mechanisms for building behaviour models for these simplified and specific architectural settings. However, the behaviour models required are those for the full generality of the system architecture, and not the simplified architecture used for scenarios. In this paper we exploit architectural information in the context of behaviour model synthesis from scenarios. Software architecture descriptions give the necessary contextual information so that component instance behaviour can be generalised to component type behaviour. Furthermore, architecture description languages can be used to describe the complex architectures in which the generalised behaviours need to be instantiated. Thus, architectural information used in conjunction with scenario-based model synthesis can support both model construction and elaboration, where the behaviour derived from simple architecture fragments can be instantiated in more complex ones

Model-based Simulation of Web Applications for Usability Assessment

In this paper we discuss an approach for simulating the behaviour of interactive software systems, before starting on any of the actual implementation, based on a model of the system at the architectural level. By providing a mock-up of the final user interface for controlling the simulation, it is possible to carry out usability assessments of the system much earlier in the design process than is usually the case. This means that design changes informed by this usability assessment can be made at this early stage. This is much less expensive than having to wait until an implementation of the system is completed before discovering flaws and having to make major changes to already implemented components. The approach is supported by a suite of cooperating tools for specification, formal modelling and animation of the system. 1