Software Evolution and Interleaving

OBJECTIVE:

Complex, evolved software is typically constructed from a tight-knit composition of computational structures, called strands, each of which is responsible for achieving some requirement, goal, or subset of system functionality. This project investigates the interleaving of program strands. The goals are to provide a rigorous characterization of stylistic ways in which strands compose and to design a representation in which to express the composition.

APPROACH:

To form a rigorous characterization of interleaving, case studies of existing software is being performed in which interleaving is investigated and compositional mechanisms are being classified. Existing formalisms for representing strands and their relationships are being surveyed and extended to create a new formalism that expresses strand composition. The understanding gained will suggest what types of documentation, programming language features, and design abstractions are needed to enable software engineers to make interleaving decisions explicit. This will alert future maintainers of interleaved software to the fact that the interleaving was intentionally introduced and mitigate problems with understanding it.

RELATED PUBLICATIONS OF INTEREST:

• Abowd, G., Ertmann-Christiansen, C., Goel, A., Jerding, D., McCracken, M., Moore, M., Murdock, J., Potts, C., Rugaber, S., and Wills, L., "MORALE: Mission-Oriented Architectural Legacy Evolution," in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, pp. 150-159, Bari, Italy, October 1997. Nominated for Best Paper Award.(Postscript version)
• Abowd, G., Goel, A., McCracken, M., Moore, M., Potts, C., Rugaber, S., and Wills, L., "Mission-Oriented Legacy System Evolution Through Architectural Recovery and Evaluation," in Proceedings of the ICSE-97 Workshop on Migration Strategies for Legacy Systems, A. Cimitile, H. Muller, and R. R. Klosch (eds.), pp. 14-18, Boston, MA, May, 1997.
• Clayton, R., Rugaber, S., Taylor, L., and Wills, L., "A Case Study of Domain-based Program Understanding," in Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Workshop on Program Comprehension, pp. 102-110, Dearborn, MI, May 1997.(Postscript version)
• Jerding, D. and Rugaber, S., "Using Visualization for Architectural Localization and Extraction," in Proceedings of the 4th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE-97), Amsterdam, the Netherlands, October, 1997. An expanded version of this paper has been invited for submission to a special issue on reverse engineering of the Science of Computer Programming.(Postscript version)
• Clayton, R., Rugaber, S., and Wills, L., "Dowsing: A Tool Framework for Domain-Oriented Browsing of Software Artifacts," submitted to the Automated Software Engineering Conference (ASE-98), October, 1998.(Postscript version)
• Rugaber, S., Stirewalt, K., and Wills, L. M., "Understanding Interleaved Code," Automated Software Engineering, Volume 3, Numbers 1-2, pp. 47-76, June 1996. (Postscript version)
• Rugaber, S., Stirewalt, K., and Wills, L.M., "The Interleaving Problem in Program Understanding," Proceedings of the Second Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, pp. 166-175, IEEE Computer Society Press, July 1995. (Postscript version)
• Rugaber, S., Stirewalt, K., and Wills, L.M., "Detecting Interleaving," Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, Nice, France, pp. 265-274, IEEE Computer Society Press, October 1995. Best Paper Award. (Postscript version)
• Rugaber, S. and Wills, L., "Toward the Knowledge Required to Understand a Program," to appear in the Proceedings of the 5th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE-98), October, 1998.
• Rugaber S. and White, J, "Restoring a Legacy," IEEE Software, Vol. 15, No. 4, July-August, 1998. (Postscript version)

RELATED PROJECTS:

• MORALE
• DARE

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Spencer Rugaber (spencer@cc.gatech.edu) 404-894-8450

Linda Wills (linda.wills@ece.gatech.edu) 404-894-4565