Software Engineering Environment Research Articles

A Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Environment for reusable software requirements and architectures

A Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Environment for reusable software requirements and architectures

Distributed Open Interworking in Software Engineering Environments

There is a wide-spread belief that the general development of software engineering environments is being hampered by the lack of integration models to allow efficient inter-tool communications and software reusability. This paper presents a distribut

ARTICULATED CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

AbstractArticulated Configuration Management is a system that provides a backplane for status accounting, source code control, embedded processes, and project management. It does this by automating and linking the processes that previously were manual evolutions.The implementation, and indeed the definition, of Configuration Management varies widely among both Department of Defense and civilian activities. Some possible scenarios are presented in the hope that new technology may provide a better solution and definition for all concerned.This paper discusses the evolution of Configuration Management systems of the past into new technology that fully automates and articulates the Software Engineering Environment. It is presented and demonstrated in partnership with SQL Software Inc. of Vienna, VirginiaIn its purest form, Configuration Management has always been viewed as the process of tracking change. The change vehicle itself goes by many names within the industry. It may be called a bug report, trouble report, change proposal or a multitude of other names. For the purpose of this paper, I will refer to the change vehicle as a change document.Historically, Configuration Management and its associated change documents have been paper forms or manually updated forms within a database. This traditional Configuration Management very rarely had a meaningful connection to the source code modification it was supposed to track. The advent of state of the art Configuration Management systems now provides us with the capability to join or articulate the change document with the modified code and its outputs.Configuration Management systems are usually predicated on the development, baseline, and release philosophy of an organization. This philosophy generally is implemented in one or more of the following three scenarios.

Repositories for co-operative information systems

Repository technology has become a pervasive part of the software development process. The role played by the repository within the modern software development process is to support a particular software engineering (SE) environment, and to provide an extensive set of services that allows CASE tools to interface with the repository. The next generation of Information Systems (ISs), often referred to as Co-operative Information Systems (CISs), will involve a number of information agents distributed over large computer and telecommunications networks. One of the most prominent problems faced by such CISs is the problem of co-operation and collaboration. It is realized that such problems are analogous to those in software development process addressed by repository technology. This paper presents the experience of introducing repository technology into a CIS. The goal of developing a shareable and reusable central repository is achieved by deploying the object-oriented data model paradigm. This paper also presents a novel way to deal with real-time CISs by separating the services of a repository into two distinct subsets provided by its off-line component and its on-line component. The successful incorporation of repository technology with a real-world CIS application has demonstrated both the feasibility and the benefits of such integration.

Agent-based workflow: TRP Support Environment (TSE)

The Technology Reinvestment Project Support Environment (TSE) introduces the notion of “agent-based workflow” in order to facilitate various parts of workflow process. Unlike some of the well known groupware products such as InterNotes or Web Forum which simply provide a passive information space, the goal of TSE is to enable active collaborative work among participants working on the TRP's “component based software engineering environment”.

A generic multicast transport service to support disconnected operation

Many mobile computing applications can profit from process groups and reliable multicast communication to maintain replicated data, but most operating systems available today fail in providing the primitive operations needed by such applications. In this paper we describe a highly configurable, Generic Multicast Transport Service (GTS), which supports the implementation of group-based applications in wide-area settings. GTS is unique in that it offers fault-tolerant, order-preserving multicast on arbitrary communication protocols, including e-mail. As another distinguishing mark, messages can be sent to processes even when they are temporarily unavailable, which permits disconnected operation and mobility. We further propose an object-oriented system design consisting of adaptor objects interconnected to form a protocol tree. Adaptor objects offer a common interface to dissimilar communication protocols, and make it easy to incorporate new protocols into GTS. Currently, GTS is being used in a cooperative software engineering environment and in other projects. GTS is available for anonymous ftp.

Integrated Product and Process Management in EPOS

EPOS is a kernel, software engineering environment. EPOS supports integrated product and process modeling through a two-layer architecture. The bottom-level EPOSDB offers a traditional ER data model extended with subtyping and meta-types, uniform ver

Towards an Integration of Software Product and Software Process Modeling

This paper discusses the integration of software product and software process modeling and management in the context of “programming-in-the large” software engineering environments. We analyze the principal concepts developed to give a formal descrip

Supporting cooperation in the SPADE-1 environment

Software development is a cooperative activity that relies heavily on the quality and effectiveness of the communication channels established within the development team and with the end-user. Process-centered software engineering environments (PSEEs) support the definition and the execution of various phases of the software process. This is achieved by explicitly defining cooperation procedures, and by supporting synchronization and data sharing among its users. PSEE and CSCW technologies have been developed rather independently from each other, leading to a large amount of research results, tools and environments, and practical experiences. We have reached a stage in technology development where it is necessary to assess and evaluate the effectiveness of the research efforts carried out so far. Moreover, it is important to understand how to integrate and exploit the results of these different efforts. The goal of the paper is to understand which kind of basic functionalities PSEEs can and should offer, and how these environments can be integrated with other tools to effectively support cooperation in software development. In particular, the paper introduces a process model we have built to support a cooperative activity related to anomaly management in an industrial software factory. The core of the paper presents and discusses the experiences and results that we have derived from this modeling activity, and how they related to the general problem of supporting cooperation in software development. The project was carried out using the SPADE (Software Process Analysis, Design and Enactment) PSEE and the ImagineDesk CSCW toolkit.

OzCare: a workflow automation system for care plans.

An automated environment for implementing and monitoring care plans and practice guidelines is very important to the reduction of hospital costs and optimization of medical care. The goal of our research effort is to design a general system architecture that facilitates the implementation of (potentially) numerous care plans. Our approach is unique in that we apply the principles and technologies of Oz a multi-user collaborative workflow system that has been used as a software engineering environment framework, to hospital care planning. We utilize not only the workflow modeling and execution facilities of Oz, but also its open-system architecture to interface it with the World Wide Web, the Medical Logic Module server, and other components of the clinical information system. Our initial proof-of-concept system, OzCare, is constructed on top of the existing Oz system. Through several experiments in which we used this system to implement some Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center care plans, we demonstrated that our system is capable and flexible for care plan automation.

DOC-a file system cache to support mobile computers

This paper identifies design requirements of system-level support for mobile computing in small form-factor battery-powered portable computers and describes their implementation in DOC (Disconnected Operation Cache). DOC is a three-level client caching system designed and implemented to allow mobile clients to transition between connected, partially disconnected and fully disconnected modes of operation with minimal user involvement. Implemented for notebook computers, DOC addresses not only typical issues of mobile elements such as resource scarcity and fluctuations in service quality but also deals with the pitfalls of MS-DOS, the operating system which prevails in the commercial notebook market. Our experiments performed in the software engineering environment of AST Research indicate not only considerable performance gains for connected and partially disconnected modes of DOC, but also the successful operation of the disconnected mode.

Software migration and reengineering: A pilot project in reengineering

This article describes the software migration and reengineering (SMR) project being sponsored by the Embedded Computing Institute. The project is nearing the end of the first phase of a four-phase effort. The purpose of the initial phase was to define the technical approach based on the expectations of the customer, investigation of previous approaches, and the availability of existing tools. The article discusses the information uncovered and describes the technical approach that was developed based on this information. The unique contributions of this project are expected to be in the areas of recovery of design information from CMS-2M and AYK-14 assembler; investigation of representations for the desired state of the system; interactive capture, display, and modification of the recovered information by the user; and integration of the SMR toolset with the F/A-18 Software Engineering Environment via population of a mainstream, commercially available CASE tool.

Orthogonally persistent object systems

Persistent Application Systems (PASs) are of increasing social and economic importance. They have the potential to be long-lived, concurrently accessed, and consist of large bodies of data and programs. Typical examples of PASs are CAD/CAM systems, office automation, CASE tools, software engineering environments, and patient-care support systems in hospitals. Orthogonally persistent object systems are intended to provide improved support for the design, construction, maintenance, and operation of PASs. Persistence abstraction allows the creation and manipulation of data in a manner that is independent of its lifetime, thereby integrating the database view of information with the programming language view. This yields a number of advantages in terms of orthogonal design and programmer productivity which are beneficial for PASs. Design principles have been proposed for persistent systems. By following these principles, languages that provide persistence as a basic abstraction have been developed. In this paper, the motivation for orthogonal persistence is reviewed along with the above mentioned design principles. The concepts for integrating programming languages and databases through the persistence abstraction, and their benefits, are given. The technology to support persistence, the achievements, and future directions of persistence research are then discussed.

Software process reengineering: Toward a new generation of CASE technology

Business process reengineering is generating considerable interest in the business community because of its demonstrated capacity to reduce costs and increase an organization's responsiveness to competitive challenges and opportunities. The software crisis, as evidence by escalating costs and sluggish responsiveness to changing requirements, is similar to the business problems now being addressed through the application of business process reengineering principles. This article applies three of these same principles to the software crisis: (1) the surfacing of tacit assumptions and an examination of them for error, obsolescence, or irrelevance; (2) a radical redefinition of processes; and (3) the use of technology as a process enabler. After applying these principles to the problems of software development, maintenance, and reengineering, we derived a radical redefinition of the software process. The capabilities of three integrated multitool CASE environments are proposed as an enabling technological infrastructure for the reengineered software process. These are the software specification, software engineering, and software reengineering environments. The reengineered software process and integrated environments are shown to leverage human resources from three sources: legacy software, domain architectures, and reuse libraries.

An examination of software maintenance practices in a U.S. government organization

AbstractIn an effort to find out more about the effectiveness of the tools, procedures, and techniques that project personnel use in their work, the Computer‐Aided Software Engineering (CASE) Environments project at the Software Engineering Institute interviewed personnel in eight software maintenance projects within a U.S. Government organization. These interviews highlighted problems that we believe are typical of many software maintenance organizations and are the subject of this paper. While the interviews discovered a need for maintenance tools to support such areas as reverse‐engineering and regression testing, these problems often had their roots in deeper issues. Such issues were a lack of design for maintenance, ineffective communication and low status of maintenance work. This paper addresses these deeper issues and suggests some approaches for their resolution.

Planning support for cooperating transactions in EPOS

The paper observes that current transaction models in databases are too strict for cooperative and long transactions in software engineering. On the other hand, unrestricted concurrency and data sharing is not desirable either. The paper describes a way to reduce the number of conflicts that may arise when several users cooperate to solve a task using a common database. Manual interaction among the users are made easier by helping a project manager to better partition, schedule and connect the users' local activities as part of a common task. Given a proposed project division, we can assess the connections between subprojects through impact analysis. Based on this analysis, the project manager can choose to adjust the initial partitioning to reduce the dependencies between subprojects. The impact analysis can further help the project manager to schedule the identified subprojects. Lastly, such analysis can be used to suggest suitable cooperation protocols between subprojects, being scheduled in parallel. Such protocols will guide mutual propagation and sharing of temporary results, and associated negotiation. The paper also reports the preliminary implementation status of this work in the EPOS kernel software engineering environment.

The design of a constraint/rule language for an object-oriented data model

Recent applications such as software engineering environments, computer-aided design, and process control require a more active data base environment in which the data base management system automatically monitors conditions and initiates appropriate actions when predefined conditions occur. In this research, a constraint/rule language, known as ALICE/ RL (ARL), is designed to support a data base environment that provides a general means for specifying active data base rules with an object-oriented view of data. The language is developed as an extension of ALICE, an Assertion Language for Integrity Constraint Expression. ARL not only extends ALICE to include rule expression capabilities, but ARL also enhances the condition expression capabilities of ALICE with features such as object identity/object equality, user-defined events, timing constraints, transition constraints, negated conditions, aggregate functions, and the triggering of multiple data base and/or user-defined actions. An important aspect of the research is the semantic analysis of ARL rules. The notion of object-centered constraints is used to define the connectivity between objects required for the valid expression of constraint and rule conditions. ARL provides a more generalized constraint/rule language than ALICE in which the results of semantic analysis can be used to debug rule conditions. A compiler for ARL with syntactic and semantic analysis was implemented as part of this research.

Major issues on process software engineering environments

This paper discusses the evolution of “programming in the large” environments and presents major innovations in software product structuring, configuration management, and software process integration. The main evolutions that are highlighted show the efforts toward integration, generalization, and modelization in order to achieve a formal description of the software process. We analyze current tendencies from the point of view of both support for resource management and software process. Focussing on the product we illustrate, using examples, the main efforts required to manage the resources involved in a software process. We show the earliest efforts to produce formal representations, applying data modeling concepts to integrate version and configuration management systems using software engineering databases. Turning to the process side of the question, we highlight recent work developing formal method to describe the process model. We conclude by presenting the Adele project, a process software engineering environment (PSEE) that achieves combined resources management (description of resources and product to be consumed and produced by the execution of activities and software process).

Experiences in the Implementation of a Process‐centered Software Engineering Environment Using Object‐Oriented Technology

Software engineering environments (SEEs) pose complex and critical requirements to the supporting repositories. Object‐oriented Database Management Systems (ODBMSs) are expected to provide suitable features to successfully address these issues. SPADE is a process‐centered SEE being developed at CEFRIEL and Politecnico di Milano. SPADE is built on top of an OODBMS and features process modeling and enactment, management of process data and facilities to integrate development tools. This article reports the experiences gained by the authors in defining the requirements for SPADE's process data repository, and in assessing six different OODBMSs against these requirements. The assessment has been carried out through several prototypes and within the context of the ESPRIT project GoodStep.

A software engineering environment driven by event-condition-action rules and its trigger mechanism

Recently, PSEEs (Process-Centred Software Engineering Environments) have been investigated as a new architecture of SEEs in which the software processes are explicitly described and drive the user interactions. A typical PSEE is composed of two components: a resource manager and a process manager. The resource manager is responsible for the management and control of all objects manipulated during the software processes. The process manager is the component supporting an explicit formalism to describe software processes. ADELE/TEMPO is a sample of this new tendency. This paper presents the main components of the kernel of the ADELE/ TEMPO system, i.e. its resource manager and process manager. Special attention is given to how these different basic components are integrated into a platform where software process models can be explicitly described by event-condition-action rules (E-C-A) and supported by an active software engineering database.