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121
A view of 20th and 21st century software engineering
- In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Software Engineering ICSE
, 2006
"... George Santayana's statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, " is only half true. The past also includes successful histories. If you haven't been made aware of them, you're often condemned not to repeat their successes. In a rapidly expandin ..."
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Cited by 63 (1 self)
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George Santayana's statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, " is only half true. The past also includes successful histories. If you haven't been made aware of them, you're often condemned not to repeat their successes. In a rapidly expanding field such as software engineering, this happens a lot. Extensive studies of many software projects such as the Standish Reports offer convincing evidence that many projects fail to repeat past successes. This paper tries to identify at least some of the major past software experiences that were well worth repeating, and some that were not. It also tries to identify underlying phenomena influencing the evolution of software engineering practices that have at least helped the author appreciate how our field has gotten to where it has been and where it is. A counterpart Santayana-like statement about the past and future might say, "In an era of rapid change, those who repeat the past are condemned to a bleak future. " (Think about the dinosaurs, and think carefully about software engineering maturity models that emphasize repeatability.) This paper also tries to identify some of the major sources of change that will affect software engineering practices in the next couple of decades, and identifies some strategies for assessing and adapting to these sources of change. It also makes some first steps towards distinguishing relatively timeless software engineering principles that are risky not to repeat, and conditions of change under which aging practices will become increasingly risky to repeat.
The Grand Challenge of Trusted Components
, 2003
"... Reusable components equipped with strict guarantees of quality can help reestablish software development on a stronger footing, by taking advantage of the scaling effect of reuse to justify the extra effort of ensuring impeccable quality. This discussion examines work intended to help the concept of ..."
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Cited by 60 (1 self)
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Reusable components equipped with strict guarantees of quality can help reestablish software development on a stronger footing, by taking advantage of the scaling effect of reuse to justify the extra effort of ensuring impeccable quality. This discussion examines work intended to help the concept of Trusted Component brings its full potential to the software industry, along two complementary directions: a "low road" leading to qualification of existing components, and a "high road" aimed at the production of components with fully proved correctness properties.
Overview of generative software development
- In Proceedings of Unconventional Programming Paradigms (UPP) 2004, 15-17 September, Mont Saint-Michel, France, Revised Papers
, 2004
"... Abstract. System family engineering seeks to exploit the commonalities among systems from a given problem domain while managing the variabilities among them in a systematic way. In system family engineering, new system variants can be rapidly created based on a set of reusable assets (such as a comm ..."
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Cited by 53 (4 self)
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Abstract. System family engineering seeks to exploit the commonalities among systems from a given problem domain while managing the variabilities among them in a systematic way. In system family engineering, new system variants can be rapidly created based on a set of reusable assets (such as a common architecture, components, models, etc.). Generative software development aims at modeling and implementing system families in such a way that a given system can be automatically generated from a specification written in one or more textual or graphical domainspecific languages. This paper gives an overview of the basic concepts and ideas of generative software development including DSLs, domain and application engineering, generative domain models, networks of domains, and technology projections. The paper also discusses the relationship of generative software development to other emerging areas such as Model Driven Development and Aspect-Oriented Software Development. 1
Test Oracles
, 2001
"... All software testing methods depend on the availability of an oracle, that is, some method for checking whether the system under test has behaved correctly on a particular execution. An ideal oracle would provide an unerring pass/fail judgment for any possible program execution, judged against a ..."
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Cited by 49 (0 self)
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All software testing methods depend on the availability of an oracle, that is, some method for checking whether the system under test has behaved correctly on a particular execution. An ideal oracle would provide an unerring pass/fail judgment for any possible program execution, judged against a natural specification of intended behavior. Practical approaches must make compromises to balance trade-offs and provide useful capabilities. This report surveys proposed approaches to the oracle problem that are general in the sense that they require neither pre-computed input/output pairs nor a previous version of the system under test. The survey is not encyclopedic, but discusses representative examples of the main approaches and tactics for solving common problems. Partially supported by the Italian National Research Council (CNR). This work has also been supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Rome Laboratory, Air Force Materiel Command, USAF, under agreement number F30602-97-2-0034. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Rome Laboratory, or the U.S. Government. 1 Contents 1
Extending JML for modular specification and verification of multi-threaded programs
- In ECOOP, LNCS 3586
, 2005
"... Abstract. The Java Modeling Language (JML) is a formal specification language for Java that allows developers to specify rich software contracts for interfaces and classes, using pre- and postconditions and invariants. Although JML has been widely studied and has robust tool support based on a varie ..."
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Cited by 25 (5 self)
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Abstract. The Java Modeling Language (JML) is a formal specification language for Java that allows developers to specify rich software contracts for interfaces and classes, using pre- and postconditions and invariants. Although JML has been widely studied and has robust tool support based on a variety of automated verification technologies, it shares a problem with many similar object-oriented specification languages—it currently only deals with sequential programs. In this paper, we extend JML to allow for effective specification of multi-threaded Java programs. The new constructs rely on the non-interference notion of method atomicity, and allow developers to specify locking and other non-interference properties of methods. Atomicity enables effective specification of method pre- and postconditions and supports Hoare-style modular reasoning about methods. Thus the new constructs mesh well with JML’s existing features. We validate the specification language design by specifying the behavior of a number of complex Java classes designed for use in multi-threaded programs. We also demonstrate that it is amenable to automated verification using model checking technology. 1
Multiple Dispatch as Dispatch on Tuples
- IN OOPSLA 1998 CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
, 1998
"... Many popular object-oriented programming languages, such as C++, Smalltalk-80, Java, and Eiffel, do not support multiple dispatch. Yet without multiple dispatch, programmers find it difficult to express binary methods and design patterns such as the "visitor" pattern. We describe a new, ..."
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Cited by 24 (6 self)
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Many popular object-oriented programming languages, such as C++, Smalltalk-80, Java, and Eiffel, do not support multiple dispatch. Yet without multiple dispatch, programmers find it difficult to express binary methods and design patterns such as the "visitor" pattern. We describe a new, simple, and orthogonal way to add multimethods to single-dispatch objectoriented languages, without affecting existing code. The new mechanism also clarifies many differences between single and multiple dispatch.
Static Interfaces in C++
- In First Workshop on C++ Template Programming
, 2000
"... We present an extensible framework for defining and using "static interfaces" in C++. Static interfaces are especially useful as constraints on template parameters. That is, in addition to the usual template <class T>, template definitions can specify that T "isa" Foo, for ..."
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Cited by 19 (1 self)
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We present an extensible framework for defining and using "static interfaces" in C++. Static interfaces are especially useful as constraints on template parameters. That is, in addition to the usual template <class T>, template definitions can specify that T "isa" Foo, for some static interface named Foo. These "isa-constraints" can be based on either inheritance (named conformance: T publicly inherits Foo), members (structural conformance: T has these member functions with these signatures), or both. The constraint mechanism imposes no space or time overheads at runtime; virtual functions are conspicuously absent from our framework. We demonstrate two key utilities of static interfaces. First, constraints enable better error messages with template code. By applying static interfaces as constraints, instantiating a template with the wrong type is an error that can be caught at the instantiation point, rather than later (typically in the bowels of the implementation). Authors of templat...
A Product Metrics Tool Integrated into a Software Development Environment
- In Proc. of the ECOOP Workshop on Object-Oriented Technology
, 1998
"... The goal of the project Crocodile is to provide concepts and tools for an effective usage of quantitative product measurement to support and facilitate design and code reviews. Our application field is the realm of object oriented programs and, particularly, reusable frameworks. ..."
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Cited by 17 (4 self)
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The goal of the project Crocodile is to provide concepts and tools for an effective usage of quantitative product measurement to support and facilitate design and code reviews. Our application field is the realm of object oriented programs and, particularly, reusable frameworks.
Patterns of interface-based programming
- Journal of Object Technology
, 2005
"... Abstract Modern software architectures heavily promote the use of interfaces. Originally conceived as a means to separate specification from implementation, popular programming languages toady accommodate interfaces as special kinds of types that can be used -in place of classes -in variable declar ..."
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Cited by 16 (6 self)
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Abstract Modern software architectures heavily promote the use of interfaces. Originally conceived as a means to separate specification from implementation, popular programming languages toady accommodate interfaces as special kinds of types that can be used -in place of classes -in variable declarations. While it is clear that these interfaces offer polymorphism independent of the inheritance hierarchy, little has been said about the systematic use of interfaces, or how they are actually used in practice. By providing a set of basic patterns of interface use together with numbers of their frequency we provide insights that should be of interest not only to the practising programmer, but also to the designers and analysts of large code bases.
