1.0 Participants

Faculty:

• Gregory Abowd
• Ashok Goel
• Mike McCracken
• Melody Moore
• Colin Potts
• Spencer Rugaber
• Linda Wills

• Bill Murdock
• Heather Richter
• Bob Waters

Our major activity during the winter quarter was the continued development of the Esprit de Corps Suite of legacy system evolution support tools. The tool suite to be demoed in Arlington consists of the following tools.

• ISVis - architectural extraction and localization tool.
• SIRRINE - model-based diagnosis and adaption tool supporting the MESA process.
• VisEd - a general-purpose architecture visualization tool.
• ACMEServer - infrastructure communications support tool for interfacing to ACMELib representations.
• ScenIC View - scenario management tool.
• REMORA - reconciles multiple views of a software architecture.
• Dowser - domain-based program understanding tools.
• SAAMPad - rationale capture and playback tool.
• MORPH - user interface migration tools.

We have also worked at integrating these tools using ACME and intend to demonstrate some degree of interoperation in Arlington.

We have used the SIRRINE2 meta-reasoning architecture for modeling human performance in arithmetic addition. We have also used this exercise for beta testing of SIRRINE2 and made several revisions based on this test.

We are working on access interfaces to captured architectural rationale sessions. We have captured a live SAAM session with Nortel in Atlanta and are now processing that captured experience to provide a number of access interfaces.

Work continues on the development of ScenIC View with a more complete semantic and episodic model and the manual posting of annotations. Work has started on the posting of rule-based automatic annotations that embody  ScenIC guidelines (ScenIC Ride).

Theoretical effort is underway in conjunction with Prof. Ana A. Anton of North Carolina State Univ. to develop a taxonomy of obstacle and goal types and standard defensive and mitigation strategies. The aim is to provide a foundation for  robust evolution of systems when new requirements involve increased automation.

A "reverse engineering" of requirements is underway with graduate student Idris Hsi, in which complex office products are being analyzed across successive and parallel versions for the evolution of feature clusters. The aim is to characterize patterns of mission-oriented requirements change so that future changes may be better predicted and planned for.

We continue to research strategies for migrating character-oriented user interfaces to HTML forms interfaces for the web.  We are experimenting with Cold Fusion and cgi scripting.  We have been working on adding a minimal code generator/restructurer to MORPH.  We are also adding a graphical user interface to the entire MORPH tool suite that will integrate it in preparation for the demos.

• Pascal Schuchhard, a former visiting student, has completed his thesis for the Delph University of Technology. It was based on work he did on SAAMPad while he was part of the MORALE team.
• We have continued working with Spectra Research to transition our reverse engineering technology. They are productizing the Dowser tool for delivery to Army development organizations.
• We have trained designers at Nortel in SAAM evaluation for  an automated call distribution (ACD) software system.
• We did work in architecture rationale capture to inform our general knowledge of automated capture and access systems, specifically in issues of visualizing and controlling long-term media streams.
• ScenIC View 0.1 has been developed and is in use internally. It supports semantic objects (goals, actors and obstacles) and a limited scenario structure (episode sequences).
• We have been working with Nortel on their ACD system (user configuration section) to convert it to the web using the MORPH toolset.

We are working with Software Engineering Institute researchers on potential collaboration between automated capture of architectural rationale and newer methods for architecture analysis, such as ATAM.

We have submitted a SIRRINE2 paper on model-based self-diagnosis and self-modification to the 1999 the Sixth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL-99).

Pascal A. Schuchhard. Supporting the Software Architecture Analysis Method Through Automated Catpure.  Masters Thesis Report,  Technical Informatics, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems, Delft University, February 1999.

Heather Richter, Pascal Schuchhard, Gregory Abowd. "Automated capture and retrieval of architectural rationale." Technical note  presented at the First Working IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA1), February 1999.  This technical note is  available online at http://www.bell-labs.com/user/dep/proj/wicsa1/.

A summary paper by Colin Potts on ScenIC has been accepted for publication in the International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE'99).

Abowd and Richter, San Antonio, Feb 1999 for WICSA1.

Colin Potts attended the IFIP Working Group 2.9 (Requirements Engineering) working meeting in Florida in January together with the RE99 program committee meeting. He also visited the Technical Univ. Tampere (Finland) in March to examine a PhD dissertation in software engineering, and while there gave an afternoon seminar on requirements engineering and MORALE.

8.0 Plans For The Next Reporting Period

Continue the development of the Esprit de Corps tools.

Preparation for demonstrations in Arlington.

Continued technology transition efforts with Nortel, MCC, SEI, and Spectra.

Perform evaluation of access interfaces with Nortel.  Solidify plans for collaboration with SEI.  Develop further visualization and  control tools for foraging architectural rationale.

ScenIC View 1.0 will be released. An internal version of ScenIC Ride (0.1) should be implemented and its rule set documented. A paper on software feature evolution is in preparation and will be available as a technical report.

We will complete the current effort to do proof of concept for code generation and will also complete the user interface for MORPH.