Agentes inteligentes para el soporte a la reutilización de software

Versión electrónica de la ponencia presentada en el Workshop de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Computación (WICC 2000), celebrado en 2000 en Buenos Aire

Design patterns as an explicit part o/ applications

Design patterns are becoming increasingly popular as mechanisms to describe general solutions to design problems that can be reused in the construction of different applications. Gamma et al. [Garnma95] define design patterns as descriptions of communicating object classes that are customized to solve a general problem in a particular contexto The basic rnotivation behind the pattern idea resides in the fact that similar design problems recur in different context [Cockburn96, Pree94, Riehle96, Buschmann96]. The main goal of patterns is to solve a specific design problem allowing flexibility of evolution. Patterns make possible to talk, as well as to think about designs on a higher level of abstraction. Instead of thinking in terms of individual classes and their behavior, it is possible to start to think in terms of collaborating classes, their relationship and responsibilities. This raises the level in which designers communicate and discuss design decisions. In this sense, one ofthe potential benefits that the use of patterns brings to software development is the understanding and maintenance of designs. Essentially, a design pattern expresses a design intent, suggesting a generic organization of classes and distribution of responsibilities among them, that solve a design problem. If a user has a design problem and knows which pattern intent to solve his problem, and what classes and methods the pattern prescribes. Then, the user can apply this pattern in his design making more reusable ones. Once the design has been finished, a11 methods prescribed by the pattern must be implemented. If a pattern was used more than one time in the same application, its methods must be implemented each time.Eje: Ingeniería del software. Computación gráfica y visualizaciónRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Enhancing framework usability through smart documentation

This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the 3rd Argentine Symposium on Object Orientation (ASOO'99), held in Buenos Aires, ArgentinaIn this work we present SmartBooks, a new approach to support framework instantiation based on the active cookbook concept, extended with the combination of the concept of user-tasks modeling and least commitment planning methods. Based on this technique, a tool can present to the developer the different high level activities that can be carried out when creating a new application from a framework, taking as basis the documentation provided by the designer through instantiation rules. For each of these high level activities, there is a list of tasks that the user must carry out in order to complete the activity. When the user selects her next objective, the tool is able to build the sequence of tasks that have to be done to accomplish that objective: the instantiation plan; and the process of plan creation is named planning. In this paper we present the main characteristics of the planning approach and an example of the instantiation tool being developed

Early Requirements Validation with 3D Worlds

It is a well-known fact the real significance of correctly determining requirements of a system at the very beginning of the development process. Indeed, experience demonstrates that the incorrect definition of requirements leads to development of deficient systems, increases the cost of its development or even causes projects to fail. Thus, it is crucial for clients to verify that the planned system satisfies their needs. In order to help users in the process of requirements understanding and validation this work proposes using 3D visualization techniques. The use of these techniques can reduce the communication gap between clients and developers resulting in a much more effective process of requirements validation. The approach tries to take advantage of the benefits of the 3D visualization, complementing this with the advantages of formal specifications. The approach proposes the use of formal specifications in a lighter way. This means that no formal reasoning (theorem proving) is carried out to check the properties of the specified system and the emphasis is focused on the execution and animation of the specification for early validation. A prototype tool that materializes the proposal was developed. The tool allows specifying the requirements in the formal language Z, defining a graphical representation of them and creating a 3D animated visualization of their execution through which the users can validate them.Fil: Teyseyre, Alfredo Raul. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Campo, Marcelo Ricardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; Argentin

Automated recognition of design patterns for framework understanding

System design is one of the most important tasks in the software development cycles but it is also one of the most complex and time-consuming tasks. Thus, reuse of existing designs becomes very important. Object-oriented frameworks are generic designs for specific application domains that enable the reuse of designs and domain expert experience. In spite of this, frameworks are not simple to reuse because they are difficult to comprehend, mainly due to a lack of good documentation and supporting tools. In this work, an approach to framework comprehension based on the automated recognition and visualization of design patterns is presented. A tool was built to support this approach, by trying to automatically identify and explain the potentia~ patterns existing in a given designo Experimental results and conclusions of tool utilization are also presented

Measuring the Impact of Agile Coaching on Students’ Performance

Agile methods have been in the cutting-edge of software engineering as a means to improve management of software development processes. The widespread use of such methods in professional contexts has encouraged their integration into software engineering training and undergraduate courses. Although there are several research works that have focused on teaching Scrum through simulating a software development project, they have covered only the learning of practices within a Scrum team, and a few of them have tackled non-technical skills beyond the development practices. Thus, we claim that it is necessary to help students understand Scrum rules, clear project obstacles and tackle non-technical issues such as management and teamwork.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

From software architecture descriptions to object-oriented designs

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a dominant approach for developing distributed enterprise-wide applications. One of the reasons for SOA’s extended use is its capacity to rapidly build applications by assembling alreadyimplemented and Internet-accessible services, which allows software organizations to hasten development of distributed applications and their consequent time-tomarket. However, this approach to develop SOA applications results unsuitable for particular organizations with high-priority and critical demands of internal control, security, flexibility, confidentiality and data integrity of their services, since the development of core functionality may be jeopardized by either uncertainty or changing environment. Although many efforts have focused mainly on facilitating discovering of services, and the outsourcing and reuse of them in SOA-based applications, little attention has been paid to aiding designers in developing services associated with business goals and quality-attribute properties. Moreover, quality-attribute properties of the service assemblies have been disregarded, which often leads to mismatches between the quality-attribute behavior prescribed by the SOA and the one resulting after its implementation. (Párrafo extraído del texto a modo de resumen)Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Measuring the Impact of Agile Coaching on Students’ Performance

Agile methods have been in the cutting-edge of software engineering as a means to improve management of software development processes. The widespread use of such methods in professional contexts has encouraged their integration into software engineering training and undergraduate courses. Although there are several research works that have focused on teaching Scrum through simulating a software development project, they have covered only the learning of practices within a Scrum team, and a few of them have tackled non-technical skills beyond the development practices. Thus, we claim that it is necessary to help students understand Scrum rules, clear project obstacles and tackle non-technical issues such as management and teamwork.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

From software architecture descriptions to object-oriented designs

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a dominant approach for developing distributed enterprise-wide applications. One of the reasons for SOA’s extended use is its capacity to rapidly build applications by assembling alreadyimplemented and Internet-accessible services, which allows software organizations to hasten development of distributed applications and their consequent time-tomarket. However, this approach to develop SOA applications results unsuitable for particular organizations with high-priority and critical demands of internal control, security, flexibility, confidentiality and data integrity of their services, since the development of core functionality may be jeopardized by either uncertainty or changing environment. Although many efforts have focused mainly on facilitating discovering of services, and the outsourcing and reuse of them in SOA-based applications, little attention has been paid to aiding designers in developing services associated with business goals and quality-attribute properties. Moreover, quality-attribute properties of the service assemblies have been disregarded, which often leads to mismatches between the quality-attribute behavior prescribed by the SOA and the one resulting after its implementation. (Párrafo extraído del texto a modo de resumen)Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Requirements visualization

Meeting user requirements of a software system has been a major challenge to software developers. Experience in a number of large projects reveals that a very large percentage of errors were made at the earlier stages of their development. Therefore, it is a well-accepted fact that it is crucial to express user requirements completely, correctly and unambiguously as possible. Many approaches have been applied to validate requirements, but most of them seem fit better to software developers than customers. In spite of their benefits, they often fail in the user validation process since they are based on formal notations not always comprehensible by users. So, in order to facilitate the comprehension by users, visualization techniques appear as an interesting alternative. Visualization techniques are a powerful tool to facilitate the analysis and understanding of complex information. In spite of the their successful in numerous computing areas, little research has been reported in the area of requirements visualization. In this work, we describe our current efforts towards the application of visualization techniques to achieve a more effective requirements validation process. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 explains visualization concepts and its benefits in the requirements validation domain. Section 3 describes the current project and identifies the different tasks involved in its development.Eje: Ingeniería del software. Computación gráfica y visualizaciónRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI