Adoption-Centric
Software Engineering

ACSE 2003 Workshop
May 9, Portland Oregon
Collocated with ICSE 2003

ACSE Background

Contents

• Introduction
• Cognitive Support
• Extending Common Office Tools
• A New Era in Interoperability
• References

Introduction

The three principal investigators have extensive experience in building software reverse engineering and visualization tools, including Rigi, PBS, and SHriMP. Over the past decade, we have directly experienced many facets of the tool adoption problem.

There are two critical issues. First, our tools had inadequate cognitive support to ease the complex software engineering tasks programmers perform. This problem became evident through informal feedback, user studies [Storey98b], and structured tool demonstrations [Sim00, Storey01a]. Second, our tools cannot do everything and must leverage other tools via interoperability mechanisms such as: data integration (so tools can read and write common formats), control integration (so one tool can control another), and presentation integration (so tools have the same, familiar look-and-feel). For example, the scripting layeer in Rigi allows it to coordinate other tools or to be controlled by other tools. Tool builders have exploited this feature successfully to create new tool environments.

For new tools to be successfully adopted, they must be compatible with both existing users and other tools.

In the follwing, we describe the issues of cognitive support, extending common office tools, and tool interoperability, which are central to our ongoing research.

Cognitive Support

Software development tools aid software engineers by participating in their thinking and work. The assistance can include helping them make complicated decisions in the context of uncertainty, helping them perform change analysis, or assisting them in understanding software architecture [Walenstein01]. Thus, in this proposal when we use the term cognitive support, we mean the principles and means by which cognitive software processes are supported or aided by software engineering tools. Walenstein's PhD thesis includes a survey of the types of phenomena that comprise cognitive support, including external memories, various external structures, and scaffolding. It also proposes methods for systematically enumerating the cognitive support provided by tools. In our ACSE project, we will specifically investigate what kind of cognitive support is needed and suited for software engineering tools, and will examine how to leverage the cognitive support already provided by existing office tools effectively.

Extending Common Office Tools

Office suites are highly popular platforms that typically offer a number of programmable core applications for document creation, drawing, database storage, spreadsheet, and presentation. Examples of these suites include Microsoft Office XP, Lotus SmartSuite, Sun StarOffice, and Corel WordPerfect Office. Other popular platforms include infrastructures such as Adobe Acrobat and Lotus Notes. A few software engineering environments exploit the functionality of such common tools.

The Desert environment includes a custom editor for producing source code and architectural documentation. This editor uses the Adobe FrameMaker application extensively. Also, the Visual Design Editor (VDE) is a domain-specific graph editor built on top of Microsoft's PowerPoint application using the Visual Basic scripting language.

A New Era in Interoperability

Interoperability among all tools in the software development life cycle is still an elusive goal. However, a remarkable array of middleware technology exists for tool developers, including XML standards, scripting languages, model-driven architectures, and plug-in platforms. For example, IBM offers Eclipse (branded as Websphere Studio Workbench), a recent, innovative, open source, plug-in architecture into which seemingly unrelated tools are effectively integrated.

Another important event in the tool development market is OMG'S Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), which promises rapid development of cross-platform interoperability solutions, ease of portability to other middleware platforms, and improved productivity when using multiple middleware platforms.

In our ACSE project, we also expect to exploit selected W3C standards and recommendations. In various research projects over the past decade, we have struggled with many tool interoperability issues involving data, control, and presentation integration. For example, we had moderate success in the adoption of RSF as an exchange format for graphs [Wong98]. Now, we can leverage GXL, an XML-based graph exchange language developed by the CSER community. Also, we have advocated making tools more flexible and extensible through end-user programming (e.g., Rigi [Tilley94b, Tilley95]) and pervasive scripting [Wong99] using a scripting language such as Tcl. Now, we can exploit ECMAScript, a standard used in Web applications. In addition, we have explored the creation of personal information spaces [Tilley94a]. Now, we can use Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a W3C recommendation for data-driven, personalized, and scalable graphics which can be embedded seamlessly on various platforms.

References

[Storey98b] M.-A. Storey; K. Wong; and H. Müller. "How do program Understanding Tools Affect how Programmers Understand Programs?" J. of Science of Computer Progr., 1999.

[Sim00] S. Sim and M.-A. Storey. "A Structured Demonstration of Program Comprehension Tools," IEEE 7th Working Conf. on Reverse Eng. (WCRE '00), Nov. 2000.

[Storey01a] M.-A. Storey, S. Sim and K.Wong, "A Collaborative Demonstration of Reverse Engineering Tools: The SORTIE Project," http://www.csr.uvic.ca/chisel/collab/.

[Walenstein01] A. Walenstein. "Cognitive Support in Software Engineering Tools: A Distributed Cognition Environment", Ph.D. Thesis, Simon Fraser University, Oct. 2001

[Wong98] K. Wong. Rigi User's Manual, University of Victoria, June 1998.

[Tilley94b] S. Tilley, K. Wong, M.-A. Storey and H. Müller. "Programmable Reverse Engineering," Int. J. of Software Eng. and Knowledge Eng., 4:4, pp. 501-520, Dec. 1994.

[Tilley95] S. Tilley. Domain-retargetable Reverse Engineering, Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Jan. 1995.

[Wong99] K. Wong. Reverse Engineering Notebook, Ph.D. Thesis, Dept. of CS, UVic, Oct. 1999.

[Tilley94a] S. Tilley. "Domain-Retargetable Reverse Engineering II: Personalized User Interfaces," IEEE Int. Conf. on Soft. Maint. (ICSM '94), pp. 336-342, Sep. 1994.