3,458 papers · page 162 of 173
Direct-manipulation user interfaces are difficult to implement as a tapered hierarchy. Features such as drag enabling and continuous graphical feedback require frequent interaction and collaboration among a large number of objects in multiple layers. These collaborations complica…
A major challenge in developing and coordinating distributed agents is to accommodate changes introduced at one agent and to propagate it to every other interested party. This presents a special difficulty if the information maintained in a node is highly structured. Examples of …
Refactorings are behaviour-preserving program transformations that automate design-level changes in object-oriented applications. Our previous research established that many schema transformations, design patterns and hot-spot meta-patterns are automatable. This research evaluate…
We present a case study on automatic synthesis of control software from formal specifications for an industrial automation control system. Our aim is to compare the effectiveness (i.e. design effort and controller quality) of automatic controller synthesis from closed loop formal…
A large portion of software development effort is focused on modification and evolution of existing software systems. To feed forward-engineering and design activities, analysts must first recover and synthesize a complete and consistent set of architectural representations. Arch…
Software architecture has been established as a viable level of representation for reuse in practical software engineering efforts. The main reason for this is that an architectural view of software is sufficiently abstract to have many instantiations. Even with technologies such…
Automated translation, or code generation, of a formal requirements model to production code can alleviate many of the problems associated with design and implementation. In this paper, we outline the requirements of such code generation to obtain a high level of confidence in th…
C/sup Y/NTHIA is a novel editor for the functional programming language ML in which each function definition is represented as the proof of a simple specification. Users of C/sup Y/NTHIA edit programs by applying sequences of high-level editing commands to existing programs. Thes…
The language AML (Architecture Meta-Language) is used to specify the semantics of architecture description languages (ADLs). It is a very primitive language, having declarations for only three constructs: elements, kinds and relationships. Each of these constructs may be constrai…
Over the last two years, we have demonstrated the feasibility of applying category-theoretic methods in specifying, synthesizing, and maintaining industrial strength software systems. We have been using a first-of-its-kind tool for this purpose. Kestrel's Specware/sup TM/ softwar…
Describes a coordination-based approach to the dynamic evolution of (software) workflow processes. Our interest is in widely distributed workflow processes, i.e. systems that allow each instance of a process model to be enacted in a distributed fashion, with different parts of th…
Large software systems often keep log files of events. Such log files can be analyzed to check whether a run of a program reveals faults in the system. We discuss how such log files can be used in software testing. We present a framework for automatically analyzing log files, and…
Motivated by NASA's need for high-assurance software, NASA Ames' Amphion project has developed a generic program generation system based on deductive synthesis. Amphion has a number of advantages, such as the ability to develop a new synthesis system simply by writing a declarati…
The application of empirical knowledge about the environment-dependent software development process is mostly based on heuristics. In this paper, we show how one can express these heuristics by using a tailored fuzzy expert system. Metrics are used as input, enabling a prediction…
Most current object modeling methods and tools have weaknesses both in the concepts of hierarchical decomposition and in the visualization of these hierarchies. Some methods do not support hierarchical decomposition at all. Those methods which do employ tools that provide explosi…
Planware is a domain-specific generator of high-performance scheduling software, currently being developed at the Kestrel Institute. Architecturally, Planware is an extension of the Specware system with domain-independent and domain-dependent parts. The domain-independent part in…
Specification-based testing is important because it relates directly to what the program is supposed to do and can detect certain errors that are often not detected by traditional code-based testing techniques such as branch coverage and statement coverage. We have developed an a…
Program understanding relates a computer program to the goals and requirements it is designed to accomplish. Application-domain analysis is a source of information that can aid program understanding by guiding the source-code analysis and providing structure to its results. The a…
Statically analyzing requirements specifications to assure that they possess desirable properties is an important activity in any rigorous software development project. The analysis is performed on an abstraction of the original requirements specification. Abstractions in the mod…
The paper presents an extension of previous work on the parameterisation of logical and algebraic specifications leading to a novel formalisation of parameterisation which is general enough to become independent of the specificities of the underlying formalism, and flexible enoug…