A number of standalone tools are designed to help developers understand software systems. These tools operate at different levels of abstraction, from low level source code to software architectures. Although recent proposals have suggested how code-level frameworks can share information, little attention has been given to the problem of connecting software architecture level frameworks. In this paper, we describe the TAXForm exchange format for frameworks at the software architecture level. By defining mappings between TAXForm and formats that are used within existing frameworks, we show how TAXForm can be used as a "binding glue" to achieve interoperability between these frameworks without having to modify their internal structure.

Abstract not found

Abstract. Modern IDEs have an open-ended plugin architecture to allow customizability. However, developing a plugin is costly in terms of effort and expertise required by the customizer. We present a two-pronged approach that allows for open-ended customizations while keeping the customization cost low. First, we explicitly limit the portion of the design space targeted by the configuration mechanism. This reduces customization cost by simplifying the configuration interface. Second, we use a declarative programming language as our configuration language. This facilitates open-ended specification of behavior without burdening the user with operational details.

We present a web-based portal site for reverse engineering software systems called REportal. REportal enables authorized users to upload their code to a secure web site and then, through the guide of wizards, browse and analyze their code. Currently the portal services include code analysis, browsing, querying, and design extraction for C, C++, and Java programs. The REportal services are implemented by several reverse engineering tools that our team has developed over the years. With this work, we aim to assist professional software engineers, educators, and other researchers who need to analyze code. Specifically, we present a technology that provides a simple and easily accessible user interface to a number of reverse engineering tools. More importantly, this technology saves the user from the time and effort required to install, administer, and integrate these tools. 1.

Rapid system understanding is required in the planning, feasibility assessment and cost estimating phases of a system renovation project. In this paper, we apply a number of analyses on two large legacy COBOL systems from the banking field. We describe the analyses performed, and discuss possible interpretations of these analyses. Lessons learned include: (1) The open architecture adopted is satisfactory, and can take advantage of a wide range of understanding tools available; and (2) To handle inter-system variability effectively, the flexibility of lexical analysis is required. 1991 Computing Reviews Classification System: D.2.2, D.2.7., D.3.4. Keywords and Phrases: Software visualization, lexical analysis, software reuse. Note: To appear in Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Workshop on Program Comprehenson, June, 1998, Ischia. Note: Work carried out under project SEN-1.1, Software Renovation. 1

. The goals of this tutorial are to: (i) give the reader a quick introduction to the field of software renovation as a whole; (ii) show that many techniques from compiler technology and formal methods can be applied; (iii) demonstrate that research should be driven by real-life, industrial, case studies; and (iv) indicate that many challenging problems are still unsolved. During the presentation of this turorial, demonstrations will be given of several of the case studies discussed here. 1 Introduction Software renovation is using tomorrow's technology to bring yesterday's software to the level of today. In this paper, we provide an overview of this research area. We start (in this section) by exploring the need for software renovation. Moreover, we provide definitions of the basic terminology, and pointers to the most important literature. We then proceed to discuss two aspects of software renovation in more detail. In Section 2 we study how we can increase our understanding of...

Form is a framework used to construct tools for analyzing the runtime behavior of standalone and distributed software systems. The architecture of Form is based on the event broadcast and pipe and filter styles. In the implementation of this architecture, execution profiles may be generated from standalone or distributed systems. The profile data is subsequently broadcast by Form to one or more views. Each view is a tool used to support program understanding or other software development activities. In this paper we describe the Form architecture and implementation, as well as a tool that was built using Form. This tool profiles Java-based distributed systems and generates UML sequence diagrams to describe their execution. We also present a case study that shows how this tool was used to extract sequence diagrams from a three-tiered EJBbased distributed application. 1.

New members of software development teams must come up-to-speed on a large amount of information before becoming productive, even if they have previous software development experience. Often, this knowledge is gained through mentoring: an experienced colleague monitors the newcomer’s progress on his or her first assigned tasks, and provides feedback and advice. The mentor is the person the newcomer turns to for help when stuck; these interactions are typically informal and lightweight, such as quick questions asked over the cubicle divider or at the water cooler. However, these light-weight channels are not always available in virtual teams, where the members of the team are not collocated. Moreover, workers are less likely to help their non-collocated colleagues, making it even harder for a newcomer to come up to speed on a project. The thesis of this dissertation is based on the idea that the collection of all artifacts created in the course of development of a software system implicitly forms a group memory—a repository of information that a work group can use to benefit from its past experience to respond more effectively to the present needs. I call this implicitly-formed group memory a project memory and make three claims: (1) that newcomer software developers can use information from the project memory about past modifications completed on the project to help them effectively perform modification tasks

WebCiao is a system for visualizing and tracking the structures of websites by creating, differencing, and analyzing archived website databases. The architecture of WebCiao allows users to create customized website analysis tools by combining a set of query and analysis operators on a virtual database pipeline. Each virtual database sent on the pipe can be converted to directed graphs, database views, or HTML reports. Within a graph view, operators can be fired from any graph node to study a selected neighborhood. WebCiao helps creators of large websites to monitor the dynamics of structural changes closely. It also helps web surfers to quickly identify new products and services from a website. An on-line demo, Website News, based on the WebCiao technology, has helped sharpen our focus with its daily analysis of new web contents from the internet and telecommunications industries. 1. Introduction The complexity and ever-changing nature of major websites are presenting problems to both...

Source code repositories best support program comprehension tasks when they can successfully answer the many questions a maintainer conceives. To provide the flexibility needed to answer these questions, the Jupiter repository system has been developed. Jupiter, using Maia, a Model based on Annotations, Indices and Attributes, can store any of the syntactic, type and flow information extractable from a program. Jupiter's query language, Mercury, formed by merging an existing query language with Scheme, is used to access the repository and manipulate query solutions. Together, these components provide a foundation on which to build systems for solving the queries that occur during program comprehension. 1