Invisibility is an inherent and significant problem in the task of developing large software systems. There are no direct solutions to this problem

We present a general model of software development environments that consists of three components: structures, mechanisms and policies. The advantage of this model is that it distinguishes intuitively those aspects of an environment that are useful in comparing and contrasting software development environments. Our initial application of the model is to characterize four classes of environments by means of a sociological metaphor based on scale: the individual, the family, the city and the state models. The utility of the IFCS taxonomy is that it delineates the important classes of interactions among software developers and exposes the ways in which current software development environments inadequately support the development of large systems. We demonstrate the generality of our model by also applying it to a previously published taxonomy that categorizes environments according to how they relate to four historical trends: language-centered, structure-oriented, toolkit and method-bas...

Code analysis tools provide support for such software engineering tasks as program understanding, software metrics, testing, and reengineering. In this article we describe GENOA, the framework underlying application generators such as Aria and GEN� � which have been used to generate a wide range of practical code analysis tools. This experience illustrates front-end retargetability of GENOA; we describe the features of the GENOA framework that allow it to be used with different front ends. While permitting arbitrary parse tree computations, the GENOA specification language has special, compact iteration operators that are tuned for expressing simple, polynomial-time analysis programs; in fact, there is a useful sublanguage of the GENOA language that can express precisely all (and only) polynomial-time (PTIME) analysis programs on parse trees. Thus, we argue that the GENOA language is a simple and convenient vehicle for implementing a range of analysis tools. We also argue that the “front-end reuse ” approach of GENOA offers an important advantage for tools aimed at large software projects: the reuse of complex, expensive build procedures to run generated tools over large source bases. In this article, we describe the GENOA framework and our experiences with it.

The gulf between the user and the developer perspectives lead to diculties in producing successful software systems. Users are focused on the problem domain, where the system's features are the primary concern. Developers are focused on the solution domain, where the system's life-cycle artifacts are key. Presently, there is little understanding of how to narrow this gulf.

Object-oriented programming is considered in the context of software communities -- groups of designers and developers sharing knowledge and experience. One way of fostering reuse of this experience is by establishing large collections of reusable object classes. Resulting problems include: ClasspacsOX6/ andcAO7 organization -- how can classes and their methods be represented to simplify reuse. Classselec7X' and exploration -- what query and browsing facilities are needed by developers in order to facilitate software reuse. Class evolution -- how may the class hierarchy be reorganized as a result of changes introduced by developers. These issues are illustrated by examining prototype tools and systems intended to aid object-oriented programming.

Abstract: This article examines the academic substance of software engineering. It identifies the basic research questions and the methods used to solve them. What is learned during this research constitutes the body of knowledge of software engineering. The article then discusses at length what about software makes its production so difficult and makes software engineering so challenging an intellectual discipline. 1

this document must be referred to ESD/AVS. Software Engineering Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 1. Introduction

: In the past ten years there has been a great deal of interest in the concept of a Software Development Environment (SDE) as a complete, unifying framework of services supporting most (or all) phases of software development and maintenance. We identify three levels at which the issue of integration in a SDE arises as a key concept --- at the mechanism level (interoperability of the hardware and basic software), at the end-user services level (combining the methods and paradigms of the various tools), and at the process level (adapting end-user services to the working practices of different users, projects and organizations). In this paper we examine SDEs from an integration perspective, describing the previous work in this area and analyzing the integration issues that must be addressed in an SDE. For illustrative purposes, a particular focus of the paper is the configuration management aspects of an SDE. 1 Introduction Developing large-scale software systems is a difficult and compl...

The bottleneck of highly integrated software development environments (SDEs) could still be the use of an underlying central data store. An environment is called highly integrated, if the included tools support most of the life-cycle phases and especially inform, analyse and check document interdependencies and even propagate changes on basically any level of granularity. In that case a central data store for documents and document interdependencies is the necessary key information base. A number of so-called object management systems (OMSs) have recently been developed to address the needs of SDEs. In order to support an environment builder to select the most appropriate one, this paper presents a new benchmark for such databases. We precisely define that benchmark in an abstract way in terms of its conceptual schema, possible initial database states and the benchmark operations. The benchmark was implemented twice to allow for a comparison of the OMSs GRAS and GemStone. We describe t...

Non-standard database systems become available now, even as commercial products. They overcome a lot of deficiencies of relational systems w.r.t. their use in engineering applications like computeraided design or software engineering. Their rather sophisticated functionality especially concerning the manipulation of complex objects makes them highly attractive for engineering applications. If being used as the central database of a rather complex application they could however still become a bottleneck w.r.t. performance. This paper presents a new way how to define a special purpose benchmark which enables to select the fastest database system for a particular software engineering application. It is argued that existing benchmarks are not appropriate to support such a selection, because they neglect important application specific characteristics which significantly influence the database performance. 1 This report has been published in: R. Welland, editor, Proc. of the Software Engin...