Hermion - Exploiting the Dynamics of Software

The current Squeak Smalltalk IDE provides a structural perspective on a software system in terms of packages, classes and methods. However, from this perspective it is difficult to gain an understanding of how source entities participate at system’s run-time. Hermion enriches the traditional IDE with a view on the dynamics of the system, (i) by offering a complementary feature-centric perspective of a software system to allow developers to reason about how specific run-time features of their software are implemented, (ii) by integrating dynamic information into the static perspective on a system, i.e., source code, and (iii) by providing mechanisms to query run-time information. 1 Enhancing the IDE with Dynamic Information The problems of understanding object-oriented software are poorly addressed by current Squeak development tools, as these tools purely focus on a structural perspective of a software system by displaying static source artifacts such as class categories, classes or methods. The running of the system, however, i.e., the execution of specific system features, is not explicitly represented in Squeak. However, as maintenance requests are typically expressed in terms of features, it is crucial for a software developer to understand the running of features. Dynamic information can enhance this understanding. To tackle the shortcoming of the existing Squeak IDE not having any explicit representation of a system’s dynamics, we propose to enhance the static perspective with a feature perspective of a software system. We present a novel feature-centric environment providing support for visual representation, interactive exploration and navigation of a system’s features [1]. Furthermore, we enrich the source code with information about its execution, i.e., run-time types of variables or precise information about methods being invoked from within a given method [2]. A third enhancement enables the developer to query gathered dynamic information from within the IDE, for instance to reveal what methods get invoked most frequently during the execution of a software feature [3]. ? Short description for the ESUG Innovation Technology Awards 2008 In the following, we give a short overview of how these three means to integrate dynamic information are implemented in our Hermion IDE, an enhanced development environment for Squeak based on the OmniBrowser framework [4]. 2 Feature-centric Environment We embed the feature-centric environment tightly in the traditional Smalltalk IDE to augment this IDE with a feature perspective of a software. This feature environment complements the traditional structural and purely textual representation of source code in a browser by presenting the developer with interactive, navigable visualizations of features in three distinct but complementary views. These views are enriched with metrics to provide the software engineer with additional information about the relevancy of source artifacts (i.e., classes and methods) to specific features. A schema of the feature-centric environment is shown in Figure 1. (1) is the test runner which is not directly part of the feature-centric environment but a separated tool. Tests are recorded scripts to execute features, but developers can also directly run the system like end-users to trigger the execution of features. The feature-centric environment contributes three different visualizations for one and the same feature: (2) the compact feature overview, (3) the feature tree view, and (4) the feature artifact browser. testCopy testCopyIntoChild testInitialized CopyCommandTest ... Test Browser tests